When entering a customer invoice, it appears that the only balancing accounts (the non-Accounts-Receivable accounts) GnuCash will allow one to choose from are income accounts and certain, non-special, liability accounts. Normally, this would be just fine for a business accounting system because businesses accrue their income when it is earned. However, individuals (such as freelancers) accrue their income only after it is paid. Therefore, if I am not paid for months (it happens), then all my tax calculations will be off because I will be paying taxes on income earned (the business way) instead of only on income paid (the individual's way).
If I had complete control, I would assign an Equity:Pending_Income account as the balancing account, to show that I had "equity" but not income, up until the time I actually get paid. Then, after I get paid, I would manually transfer that money from that special Equity:Pending_Income account to an appropriate income account. I recognize that when applying a payment to a customer invoice, the only ledger entries made are the transfer from the Assets:Accounts-Receivable account to the Assets:Whatever_Banking_Account account. So, any other transfers/ledger-entries would need to be made by hand. However, because the above is not possible, I am looking for other alternatives. My first thought is to simply introduce another level to the income accounts hierarchy. Something like: Income:Pending Income:Paid (placeholder) :<all the other accounts normally under income> I would still have to manually create a separate ledger entry to transfer money from the Income:Pending account to the actual income account it belongs in. And, I would then have to figure out how to generate reports that ONLY reported income from under the Income:Paid placeholder parent account. Would that be too very difficult? Or would I just be creating an ever-increasing amount of compounding complexity to my accounting workflow? In the end, it seems GnuCash is not really designed for freelancers yet. All assumptions are that one is operating as a business with paid employees. It seems to me, to achieve the most flexibility, GnuCash should allow users to custom configure the behavior of the invoice and payment features, to allow us to automatically do whatever transfers and ledger entries we see fit to achieve the intended goal. -- 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.