[GNC] Keeping tenant accounts on Gnucash - periodic 'rent owing' ?

[arthur brogard]

I am just  making this late post only to say thanks for all the input and inform that my silence indicates my brow furrowed attempts at understanding and implementing.
I hope no one thinks I am rudely and ungratefully ignoring their help.  :)

    On Saturday, 5 March 2022, 06:51:20 pm ACDT, flywire <flywire0 at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Excellent question Arthur. This isn't a budget issue and you have no idea if tenants are in front or behind unless you compare it to payments due. Adrien seems to have presented the GnuCash features the best using a scheduled A/R.
I've used a different approach with quickbooks for this purpose because it has classes allowing one set of accounts to be tagged to different tenants but it should be equivalent with GnuCash. Accounts include: Income/rent, bond (contra), Expense/water (partially reimbursable), various misc income and expenditure relating to tenants. It's easy to miss seldom used accounts.
My concern is A/R is a lot of work just to get tenant statements if it's not used elsewhere. It is similar to the issue raised last month regarding tracking vehicles except for the regular rent due: https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2022-February/099785.html As described GnuCash has filtering on tags (eg report a single tenant) but no grouping (eg reports for every tenant and everything else). This is important to ensure all transactions are accounted for with tags.
Alternative Process:1. Upload bank transactions to GnuCash2. In GnuCash terms, run a transaction report sorted by say date and split notes (assuming it contains a tag) with payments3. Open report in a spreadsheet with sheets for each tenant having: Date, Due, Payments, Balance Owing4. Append date and payments to each tenants sheet5. Append date and amount due for each period6. Sort by date and payments then copy balance owing formula down for running total7. Check header and footer then print rental statement
The spreadsheet ends up as a template that is updated. It's a simple process but it's manual so it carries a risk of mistakes. While GnuCash doesn't support grouping in reports the advantage of open source is the whole thing could easily be automated under piecash to generate reports.
A dozen transactions would make a handy demo dataset.