[GNC] How to set a customer "opening balance" for the Customer

[Adrien Monteleone]

> On Oct 17, 2019 w42d290, at 4:59 PM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op woensdag 16 oktober 2019 21:37:45 CEST schreef Adrien Monteleone:
>>> On Oct 16, 2019 w42d289, at 2:11 PM, James Thorpe
>>> <James at fusionsystems.co.za> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the responses.
>>> 
>>> Stan:  I had not considered creating separate AR accounts for each
>>> customer. That may be a wise thing to do although it seems the business
>>> features track the customer payments etc fine if all are in the same AR
>>> account provided.... you use the Invoice/ Payment mechanism to create the
>>> entries.
>>> 
>>> However, I just tested doing that with a dummy set of accounts and while
>>> you can set the opening balance in that way, because the opening balance
>>> is not linked to the customer in the business features, it doesn't show
>>> on the "Customer Report". To get it to show there may require some more
>>> trickery of some sort. You can "assign as payment" but I don't know any
>>> other way of doing it.
>> I don’t know of any such wizardry either. The Business Features can’t 'see'
>> manual transactions. As Opening Balances aren’t a payment, there’s no way
>> to get them to recognize this. (what would you assign it to?)
>> 
> You'd assign it to the Opening Balance account.

Indeed, I see in the Process Payment screen you can assign it to that account.

Considering the below info, I too think this is the way to go.


Regards,
Adrien
> 
>> Maybe (I haven’t tried) you could use Process Payment to make the entry
>> (rather than make it manually and doing an ‘Assign’) and set the amount as
>> negative, which would effectively create a debit to AR, and assign it to
>> the customer. You might also be able to put "Balance Forward" or some such
>> in the Memo field in the Process Payment dialog. But then when that
>> customer starts making payments, I don’t know if you could ‘apply’ them
>> properly to that Balance Forward or if they’d all just float un-linked
>> forever. That might be worth a little trial though.
>> 
> This is the way to go IMO. Create the opening balance as a refund (via Process 
> Payment) for each customer with an opening balance. Future customer payments 
> can be "applied" to this opening balance "refund".
> 
> As an aside you can apply payments and credit notes against either invoices or 
> refunds as you see fit, so applying a payment against an earlier refund is 
> perfectly fine.
> 
> Note as gnucash doesn't know anything about special opening balances for 
> customers it will present these payments as just that - payments. So there 
> will be a "Pre-Payment" note in the payment window for your opening balance 
> "payment" as well. For your own convenience I recommend indeed to add a Memo 
> to this opening balance "payment" as Adrien already suggests.
> 
> Final note, if you have customers that had a positive balance (that is paid 
> you more than you invoiced them), you obviously have to apply the inverse 
> logic. For those customers you need to create a "payment" opening balance 
> instead of a "refund" opening balance.
> 
>> I suspect however if you try to enter a negative payment it will flip to the
>> ‘refund’ box and not work.
>> 
> That's just a visual inconvenience, internally a refund and a negative payment 
> are the same thing.
> 
>> On that line of thought, you might be able to ‘abuse’ Credit Notes with
>> reversed amounts posted to the Equity:Opening Balance account (if it will
>> let you), you might then be able to assign future payments against the
>> ’negative’ credit note. This wouldn’t be much different from entering an
>> invoice though, so likely not worth the hassle.
>> 
> These inherit the same limitation as invoices in that you can't transfer to 
> the opening balance.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Geert