[GNC] Assign one payment to multiple invoices (from several customers)

Bat bateast+gnucash at bat.fr.eu.org
Mon Sep 9 11:31:37 EDT 2019


Hi,

thank you for your suggestions.

I understand your propositions, though they would involve many more
manual steps (rather than using the [Pay] action on an invoice or
[Process Payment] from Business menu).

And it would not be in the gnucash internal logic, which manage invoice
payments (through lots) at split level (which seems logic and fine).

It is really just a UI difficulty and its a pitty that their is no way
to do it correctly easily.

Thank you anyway, I’m filling a request in bugzilla, and just may hope
that it improves …

🦇 ~^v^~ Bat

On 06/09/2019 13:20, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> There is a ‘better’ way, at least one that doesn’t involve messing with lots.
>
> I’m not sure if anyone has filed an RFE for this use case though. If you don’t see something on Bugzilla, feel free to file it, though it might not be implemented with any haste as this is definitely not a common case. (one business I used to work for did occasionally have this situation a couple of times per year)
>
> I would create a holding asset account to receive the payment initially. (don’t apply it to an invoice yet)
>
> Then pay the various invoices from that holding account. You’ll have to apply payments for each customer separately. (but can select multiple invoices for any one customer at a time as before)
>
> You can use the same NUM if you like for all transactions so their references match.
>
> An example account might be a sub-account of AR, 'Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable:Payments Pending’, but don’t make it as “type” ‘AR’ make sure it is just of type “Asset”.
>
> Let’s say CustomerA made a payment of 1000.00 with 800.00 being for two of their own invoices and 200.00 being for CustomerB
>
> The initial receipt would look like this:
>
> Dr. Assets:Current Assets:Checking/Cash/Undeposited Funds		1000.00
> 	Cr. Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable:Payments Pending		1000.00
>
> Then after you apply CustomerA’s portion to their two invoices:
>
> Dr. Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable:Payments Pending		800.00
> 	Cr. Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable				800.00
>
> And after you apply the remaining amount to CustomerB’s invoice(s):
>
> Dr. Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable:Payments Pending		200.00
> 	Cr. Assets:Current Assets:Accounts Receivable				200.00
>
> ---------
>
> There might be other ways which involve applying the entire payment to CustomerA’s account (leaving the balance as an ‘overpayment/pre-payment’) then ‘refunding’ the difference to some holding account, then applying it to CustomerB but those would involve more steps.
>
> In any case, I’d model the real-world movement of funds as best as possible. (this latter case might be what you need to do if a customer decided months later to apply a credit from over/pre-payment to say, the balance for a friend, child, etc.
>
> But you should be able to accomplish this modeling without resorting to editing lots. The only time I edit lots is if through unposting and reposting bills/invoices, GnuCash doesn’t re-apply my various payments properly.
>
> Finally, I’d be sure to use all needed fields at my disposal to document what was going on so I could see at a glance that the various AR payments were really a single receipt, or involved credit applied from one Customer to another. You have the NUM field, Action field (which can be anything you like, though single words are probably best), Notes field (only visible in Double Line Mode), and the Memo field for each split.
>
> Regards,
> Adrien
>
>
>> On Sep 5, 2019 w36d248, at 10:07 AM, Bat <bateast+gnucash at bat.fr.eu.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> this is a subject that appears regularly on the mailing list, but I can not find fine answer neither plan to improve the situation.
>>
>> Some of my customers often pay for their invoices plus for the one of other customer. So I get one payment (with one reference) to split to multiple invoices.
>>
>> The distribution of one payment to several invoices is natural through business features if the invoices are for the same customer. But not if the invoices belong to several customers.
>>
>> So today, I record the payment on the customer’s invoice, go into the AR account and verify the splits of the transaction, go into Action -> Lots to manually remove the other split from the customer payment lot and assign it to the other customer invoice lot.
>>
>> Is – there a better way to do that ?
>>
>> Is – there a plan to allow selecting several customers invoices in manage a payment GUI ?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> -- 
>> 🦇 ~^v^~ Bat
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