There is no need to zero out the invoice. It remains as it originally was and the debt remains on the books. What the debt write off does is correct your income for the amount of income you expected to but didn't receive and adjusts the accounts receivable to reflect that you do not expect to receive that income.
If you cancel out the invoice and at some future time the client coughs up the money, you will have no way of accounting for how that money was received but a simple adjustment allows you to reverse the bad debt write off and then record the payment against the original invoice. When you make a payment against an invoice normally, you do not change the amount of the invoice, itself but you increase the amount of an asset(bank account) and decrease the amount of the Accounts receivable (also an asset ) by the same amount. The invoice creates an increase in an income account and an increase in the Accounts receivable when it is posted to you accounts. In the case of a bad debt you do not adjust the income but an expense account which has the same effect on your profit. Expense accounts can be regarded as contra income accounts. This way your accounts contain a record of the events as they affected your finances at the time the events occurred. If they are annotated well enough anyone can reconstruct the sequence of events as recorded David Cousens ----- David Cousens -- Sent from: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/GnuCash-User-f1415819.html _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
