[GNC] Data Entry Overload - Create Bill + Post Bill + Pay Bill vs just Pay Bill?

[Adrien Monteleone]

My rule is to create bills for everything which is a receivable for the 
vendor. (not an immediate sale)

So if I get an invoice from them, and have to issue payment, I create 
the bill.

In this case, while it seems you're dealing with an immediate sale, if 
the payment fails for some reason, you still have to issue payment 
manually. By 'immediate sale' I mean those cases where I personally make 
the payment manually on the spot. (such as online purchases, or in 
person purchases)

I probably would also create bills for such items like you describe 
simply to afford myself the use of Vendor Reports and Payables tracking, 
especially if not all of their invoices to me fall under this use case. 
But I understand that might not work for everyone.

Do you happen to know what those 50-100 line items are in advance? (are 
they recurring each year, or are they truly guaranteed charges but 
one-offs as to the details?)

Duplication is how I enter about 99% of my vendor bills already. But if 
that gets tedious, and you know the data in advance, create a 
spreadsheet with that invoice data according to the format specified in 
the Help/Guide, then import them all at once. (some will of course have 
future dates)

As they get auto-drafted, enter or import the payment transaction and 
apply as payment.

When you run reports, instead of using the default 'end of accounting 
period' use 'today' as your end date. That way, the future posted 
invoices won't affect the report.

But this does give you the benefit of including them to see a projection 
of future due expenses if you like.

Another option is to forego the Business Features for that Vendor (or 
for those Bills) and use Scheduled Transactions. You will still want to 
review and edit the transaction with the line-item detail in a split 
memo, but otherwise, you will cut down on clicks and data entry. At 
least do an SX for the expenses (Bills) but you could do one for the 
payment as well, and upon review before committing, check your bank 
online to verify successful payment, then mark the 'r' column as 'c' for 
that split.

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Adrien

On 10/9/20 10:38 AM, Fran_3 via gnucash-user wrote:
> Posting Bills allows you to keep track of AP and provides data to the Bills Due Reminder...
> However some routine expenses may just get paid without going through the steps of creating and posting and paying a bill.
> For a small venture posting bills can require a lot of keyboard time... even duplicating a bill requires a number of steps, data entry, and clicks and can eat up time if you have a bunch of them to do...
> Example, we have a couple of vendor from which we get 50+ to 100+ charges per year. They each are on auto pay and are mostly for the same amount per charge... but each charge is for a different thing... so descriptions, due dates, etc are different for each item.
> (You can think of these as if they were an annual listing or service fee... one for each item.)
> I got reminded of this recently when we made an effort to enter/create Bills for the 100+ charges that were going to occur for Vendor-A over the next 12 months... again, the big corporate vendor does not supply a monthly Bill listing all charges for that month... the item fee comes up and gets auto paid... so 100+ transactions per year for that one vendor.
> 
> It is a lot less work to just enter each payment into the system as opposed to first creating a bill then posting a bill and then paying the bill.
> How do you all choose which things to create Bills for and which things just Pay?
> Thanks.