Aaron,

I don’t think there is any definable max credit amount you can specify for a 
customer. (or yourself as in a credit card, or vender credit line for that 
matter)

I would suspect the ‘credit limit’ feature in the new customer dialog is there 
to flag a warning when you are posting invoices to their account when that 
limit is exceeded. ‘Credit’ here isn’t what you owe them, it is what they owe 
you. So a credit limit on their account of 1000, would mean they can’t have 
unpaid invoices of over 1000 at a time. It isn’t that you owe them 1000 due to 
an overpayment or discount/allowance that they haven’t ‘cashed in’ yet or that 
you haven’t yet refunded in cash. I don’t set limits for my customers, so I 
don’t know for sure what happens if the limit is exceeded.

There are two options with regards to customer credits:

1) Issue a Credit Note for the amount you want to credit the customer and apply 
it to future invoices as needed.
2) Process a Payment for the customer without selecting an invoice, this will 
appear as a ‘pre-payment’ and can be applied to future invoices as well.

You would choose the 2nd one if you haven’t yet recorded the receipt of that 
payment. (you would be balancing the AR portion of the transaction by a receipt 
of cash or undeposited funds)

You would choose the 1st option if you’ve already recorded that over/pre 
payment by other means and just want to reflect the credit portion to the 
customer, OR, if the credit is for some consideration like a 
discount/refund/incentive et cetera that you are balancing against an 
income/sales/revenue account such as ‘Discounts & Allowances’ or ‘Returns’.

You can either issue a credit note (a negative invoice) to a customer, then 
apply it to future invoices as it is used. (by using ‘Process Payment’ from the 
Business > Customer menu, then selecting both the credit note and new invoice - 
GnuCash will offset the invoice with the value of the credit note, if any is 
left over on the credit note, it will remain for the next invoice, if the 
invoice is still not satisfied you can optionally apply an payment from the 
customer to satisfy it at this time, or later)

Be mindful that the credit note shows you owe the customer. If you pay the 
credit note, you no longer owe the customer.

When you ‘apply as payment’ (or use ‘Process Payment) on a credit note, you are 
issuing a refund to the customer. That is probably not what you were intending.

Regards,
Adrien






> On Dec 17, 2019 w51d351, at 9:30 PM, Aaron Mina <aaron.scha...@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hello Michael,
> 
> Thank you for pointing me there.  This helped me see the radio button option 
> for "Invoice" and "Credit Note" when creating a new invoice.
> 
> I searched the site for "Credit Limit" and "Customer Credit Limit" to see if 
> there was any documentation around that, thinking that it would be the 
> credits that client has to use and then the credit note would subtract from 
> that.  It doesn't look like it does that and I tried to post a payment to the 
> credit note to find that it doesn't show up there either.
> 
> I am half way there, just need the other part of the puzzle, especially since 
> this year is ending and trying to wind down the books.
> 
> Thank you for the help thus far, and here's to hoping to cross the finish 
> line with this soon!
> Aaron
> 
> On 2019-12-15 6:13 a.m., Michael Hendry wrote:
>>> On 14 Dec 2019, at 22:00, Aaron Mina <aaron.scha...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hello,
>>> 
>>> I would like to know how credits are used in GNUCash.  I am running 2.6.19 
>>> on Ubuntu.  I have a client that I want to start off with credits.  I put 
>>> in a credit while opening the new customer dialogs.    I just posted an 
>>> invoice to the account and when I went to pay it, the credits didn't show 
>>> up.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> What is the proper way to assign credits to an account and use them?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Thank you,
>>> Aaron
>> 
>> I don’t use invoicing, but it would seem logical to issue a credit note to 
>> the customer when setting up, if you already owe that customer money.
>> 
>> https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Credit_Notes
>> 
>> Michael

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