# Business Features

The accounting needs of a business are quite different from that of a person. Businesses have customers that owe money, vendors which are owed money, employee payroll, more complex tax laws, etc. &app; offers business oriented features to facilitate these needs.

Accounts Receivable (A/R) are used by businesses to record sales for which they are not immediately paid. Accounts Payable (A/P) record bills that they have received, but might not pay until later. These types of accounts are used primarily when you have a lot of bills and receipts flowing in and out, and do not want to lose track of them just because you do not pay or get paid right away. For most home users, A/R and A/P are too complicated to be worth the effort.

Accounts Receivable (or A/R) refers to products or services provided by your company for which payment has not yet been received. This is represented on the balance sheet as an asset, because the expectation is that you will receive payment soon.

Accounts Payable (or A/P) refers to products or services bought by your company for which payment has not yet been sent. This is represented on the balance sheet as a liability because you will have to pay for them.

## Initial Setup

To set up &app; to handle accounts receivable and accounts payable for a company the following preliminary steps must be done.

### Account Setup

There are many different ways to set up a business account hierarchy. You can start with the Business Accounts setup which is available from the New Account Hierarchy assistant, or you could build one manually. To access the prebuilt Business Accounts, start &app; and click on File New File and proceed until you see the list of available accounts, select Business Accounts.

The prebuilt Business Account hierarchy will not meet your needs exactly. You will need to make adjustments for the hierarchy to function well with your particular situation. It should be close enough that it is recommended you begin with it.

### Tax Tables

Tax Tables can used to determine the tax for customer invoices (or vendor bills).

A tax table can be assigned to an invoice line or bill line.

The default invoice line tax table can be assigned to each customer and the default bill line tax table can be assigned to each vendor.

The default tax table for new customers or new vendors can be specified in the Book Options window which can be accessed by File Properties Business tab.

Tax Tables are maintained using the Sales Tax Table editor which is accessed via menu Business Sales Tax Table . The following fields should be entered:

- Name This is the tax table name.

- Type Either Percent % or Value $.

- ValueThis is the percentage or value depending on Type.

- Account This is the account to which tax will be posted. For tax collected from customers, this should probably be a Liability account as it must be payed to the government. For tax paid to vendors, if tax laws allow tax paid to vendors to offset tax collected from customers, this should probably also be a Liability account (even though it will usually have a debit balance) so that the net tax owed to the government can be easily observed.

  If you set up Tax on Purchases and Tax on Sales as subaccounts of Liabilities:Tax then the net tax will be rolled up and can be seen in the &app; Accounts tab.

  If unsure about tax law requirements, get professional advice.

### Company Registration

After you have built the account structure and defined your tax tables, register the &app; file as belonging to your company by filling in the data requested in the accessible from the File Properties menu item.

### Counters

Define the format and last used numbers of codes such as customer, invoice, vendor, bill, employee, expense voucher, job number and order. See .

### Business Preferences

Set options on the Business tab of the &app; preferences, which is accessed via Edit Preferences ( GnuCash Preferences on &mac;). See .

### Billing Terms

Billing Terms can be used to determine the payment due date and be a guide for determining discount for early payment of invoices (or vendor bills).

As of &app; 2.6.7, Billing terms are only partially supported. Date due is calculated but discount amount is not.

Discount for early invoice payment is not implemented. There are 2 ways this may be done, although neither is recommended, and professional advice should be used to confirm that regulations are being complied with:

- After creating and posting a payment which pays the invoice in full, manually edit the payment transaction (usually strongly discouraged) and split the payment to reduce it by the amount of the discount and a create a compensating split in an income (discount) account.

- Alternatively, after creating and posting a payment for the discounted amount, create a credit note for the discount using a specific negative sales income (discount) account for the transfer account.

You can specify the billing terms on each invoice/bill. Invoice billing terms will default from the customer billing terms. Bill billing terms will default from the vendor billing terms.

Billing Terms are maintained using the Billing Terms Editor which is accessed via menu Business Billing Terms Editor . The following fields should be entered:

- Name The internal name of the billing term. For some examples of billing term names and descriptions see

- Description The description of the billing term, printed on invoices

- There are 2 types of billing terms, with different information to be entered

  - Type Days

    - Due Days The invoice or bill is due to be paid within this number of days after the post date

    - Discount Days The number of days after the post date during which a discount will be applied for early payment

    - Discount % The percentage discount applied for early payment

  - Type Proximo

    - Due Day The day of the month bills are due

    - Discount Day The last day of the month for the early payment discount

    - Discount % The discount percentage applied if paid early

    - Cutoff Day The cutoff day for applying bills to the next month. After the cutoff, bills are applied to the following month. Negative values count backwards from the end of the month.

## Accounts Receivable

&app; has an integrated accounts receivable system.

To use &app;’s integrated accounts receivable system, you must first set up Accounts Receivable accounts of type A/Receivable under Assets to accrue income you're owed. It is within this account that the integrated A/R system will place transactions, debiting it when you post bills and crediting it when you receive payments.

### Basic A/R Account Hierarchy

    -Assets
      -Accounts Receivable
      -Checking
    -Income
      -Sales
    -Liabilities
      -Tax
        -Tax on Purchases
        -Tax on Sales

If you deal with customers in more than one currency you will need a separate Accounts Receivable account for each currency:

    -Assets
      -Accounts Receivable
        -CHF
        -EUR
        :

You need to add additional asset, expense, and income accounts to this hierarchy for it to be useful. The important aspects of this hierarchy are the use of an income account and the Accounts Receivable asset account, with account type set to A/Receivable.

The transactions generated by the A/R system are recorded within the Accounts Receivable account. You generally do not work directly with this account. You generally work with the four integrated &app; A/R application components available through the Business Customer sub-menu. These four components are:

  People or companies to whom you sell products or services on credit.

  The physical invoice you send to a customer to request payment. This invoice contains an itemized list of things you sold.

  Is where you register Customer Jobs. Jobs are a mechanism by which you can group multiple invoices to a particular customer.

  Used to register payments you received from a customer.

The following sections introduce the individual components in more detail.

## Customers

Customers are people or companies to whom you sell goods or services. They must be registered within the A/R system.

### New

To register a new customer, enter the menu Business Customer New Customer . Fill in customer information, such as Company Name, Address, Phone, Fax, etc. Below is a list of the other options:

- Identification - Customer Number - can be any number by which you would like to refer to this customer. You may leave it blank and a number will be chosen automatically. See for more info.

- Identification - Active - differentiates active customers from inactive ones. This is useful when you have many past customers, and you want to see only those marked active.

- Billing Address - Name - is the contact name of the person to receive the invoices.

- Notes - records any additional comments about the customer.

- Billing Information - Currency - specifies the billing currency for this customer. It will default to the default currency set in Preferences

  All invoices will be denominated in this currency and &app; will require an Accounts Receivable account in this currency.

- Billing Information - Terms - specifies the default billing terms for this customer. Billing terms must be preregistered using Business Billing Terms Editor .

- Billing Information - Discount - gives the customer a default percentage based discount at the time of invoice creation. Enter a value from 0 to 100. You can override the default discount when you create an invoice.

- Billing Information - Credit Limit - stores the maximum credit you are willing to extend to the customer. This field is for your reference purposes only. &app; does not use the value.

- Billing Information - Tax Included - this specifies whether nor not tax is included in invoice amounts by default. You can choose Yes, No, or Use Global.

  - Yes means that the tax is already included in amounts on invoices.

  - No means tax is not included.

  - Use Global means to use the setting made in the global preferences accessible through Edit Preferences ( Gnucash Preferences on &mac;).

- Billing Information - Tax Table - specifies a default tax table to apply to invoice line items. Tax tables must be registered from the Business Tax Table Editor menu item.

- Shipping Address - records the customer’s shipping address if it is different from the billing address. The shipping address is for your reference. &app; does not use the value.

### Find and Edit

To search for an existing customer, use the Business Customer Find Customer window. You select a customer to View/Edit from the results of the search. This window is also used to look up customers when creating invoices and processing payments.

If many customers match the search criteria you provide, the search can be refined by running an additional search within the current results. The current result set is searched when the Refine Current Search radio button is selected. In fact, &app; selects this option for you after you run the initial search.

If the customer you are searching for does not match the supplied search criteria, change the search criteria, click the New Search radio button and then the Find button. The relevant step is the New Search selection. If the customer is not in the result of the original search, and you only search within this set, the customer cannot be found, regardless of new search criteria.

To return a list of all registered active customers, set the search criterion to matches regex, and place a single dot "." in the text field area. Make sure Search only active data is checked, then click Find. The regular expression "." means to match anything.

## Invoices

An invoice is the paperwork you send to a customer to request payment for products or services rendered. &app; can generate and track invoices.

A credit note is the paperwork you send to a customer to correct products or services rendered that were incorrectly invoiced. &app; can generate and track credit notes via the same menu entries as invoices.

This section applies to both invoices and credit notes. In order to avoid repeating everything twice and to keep the text easier to read it will refer only to invoices. You can apply it equally to credit notes. Only where the behaviour of credit notes differs from invoices this will be explicitly mentioned. Credit notes were introduced starting with &app; stable release 2.6.0.

### New

To send an invoice to a customer you must first create a new invoice. To create an invoice use Business Customer New Invoice . The New Invoice window must be filled in appropriately:

- Invoice Information - Type: the type of customer document to create - either an invoice or a credit note.

- Invoice Information - Invoice ID (optional): the formated identification number of this invoice. This is your internal number for this invoice. If you leave it blank, an invoice number will be generated automatically. See for more info.

- Invoice Information - Date Opened: the date this invoice was created.

- Billing Information - Customer: the customer who is to receive this invoice. If you remember the company name you entered in the New Customer window for this customer, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Customer window described in . Highlight the customer you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Billing Information - Job (optional): associates the new invoice with a customer job (see ). If you remember the job name you entered in the New Job window for this job, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Job window. This window is the same to the one described in . Highlight the job you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Billing Information - Billing ID: this is the customer’s PO Number or other customer reference number. You should use it to identify your invoices to this customer (and job, if you have one).

- Billing Information - Terms: the payback terms agreement for this invoice. A list of registered terms is available within the pop up menu. If you specified a default value for the selected customer, this field is initialized with the default.

- Notes: Here you can enter internal notes.

When you click the OK button, the Edit Invoice window opens.

### Edit

From the Edit Invoice window you can enter an itemized list of goods and services you sold on this invoice in a manner similar to how the account register works. For credit notes you enter an itemized list of goods and services you refunded instead.

Saved column layout works a bit differently in invoices from the account registers: Layouts are not saved for each invoice; instead a layout can be saved as a default for invoices to override the calculated widths using the View>Use as Default Layout for Customer Documents and the calculated widths restored as the default with View>Reset Default Layout for Customer Documents.

There are 15 columns in the Invoice Entries area:

- Date - The date this item was sold.

- Invoiced? - X means the item is attached to this invoice, an empty box means the item is not attached to this invoice. The item is attached for you when you proceed to the next line item.

- Description (optional) - is what the item or service is called.

- Action (optional) - is a user defined field. You can place Cost Center information here, or use one of the 3 predefined actions, Hours, Material, or Project.

- Income Account - selects which income account is credited with this income.

- Quantity - tracks how many of the items you sold.

- Unit Price - is the unit price of the item.

- Discount Type - is the type of discount:

  - $ means Discount is a monetary value

  - % means Discount is a percentage.

  You can click the field to toggle between the discount types.

- Discount How - the discount can be computed as follows:

  - > means the discount applies after tax.

  - < means the discount applies before tax.

  - = means both discount and tax are applied to the pretax value.

  You can click the field to change the setting.

- Discount (optional) - is the total discount, in monetary units or percentage, depending on Discount Type. You can leave it blank for no discount. Any default discount you specified for the customer will be automatically entered for each new item.

- Taxable? - is this item taxable? X means yes, a blank field means no. You can click the field to toggle the setting.

- Tax Included? - has the tax already been included in the unit price? X means yes, a blank field means no. For example, if there is 1 item of $100 with a tax of 5% then:

  - If Tax Included is empty, then subtotal = $100 and tax = $5.

  - If Tax included is set (X), then subtotal = $95.23 and tax = $4.77. The computation is: Subtotal = Total / (1+taxrate) and Tax = Total - Subtotal = Total - (Total / (1+taxrate)).

- Tax Table (optional) - this is a pop up menu of all the available tax tables. If you make the item taxable, then this table is used to compute the amount of tax. The tax table determines tax percentages and the accounts to which tax is charged.

- Subtotal (uneditable) - is the computed subtotal for this item (less tax).

- Tax (uneditable) - is the computed tax for this item.

When you have finished entering all the items, you can Post and print the invoice.

### Post

When you finish editing an invoice and are ready to print, you must Post the invoice. The invoice does not have to be posted immediately. In fact, you should only post an invoice when you are ready to print it. Posting an invoice places the transactions in an accounts receivable account.

The Post Invoice window appears and asks you to enter the following information:

- Post Date - specifies the date for the transactions entered into the accounts receivable account. By default this is the invoice’s Date Opened (see for information about that date).

- Due Date - is the date on which payment for the invoice is expected.

  - If you specified payment terms when you created the invoice, the date is calculated according to selected terms, and the entry field is insensitive.

  - If you did not specify payment terms, enter the expected payment due date here.

- Description - is an arbitrary description. When invoice transactions are placed in the accounts receivable account, this description is entered in the memo field of those transactions.

- Post To Account - selects the accounts receivable account in which invoice transactions are posted. You can select the account from a list of existing A/Receivable accounts.

- Accumulate Splits - determines if invoice items which transfer to the same account are combined into a single split for that account or entered individually. For the sample invoice which sold Nails and a Hammer, the setting affects post results as follows:

  - Checked (splits are accumulated) - a single transfer of $575.00 from the Income:Sales account is recorded.

  - Not checked - the transaction created in the A/Receivable account, shows two transfers from Income:Sales account $100.00 and $475.00. The memo fields in the splits indicate the sale of Nails and the Hammer (the item descriptions entered on the invoice) respectively.

### Find

To find an existing invoice, use the Business Customer Find Invoice menu item. From the results of the search, you can select an invoice to edit or view.

Before you can edit a posted invoice, you will need to Unpost it.

One of the design goals in &app;’s Account Receivable system was to allow different processes to get to the same state, so you can reach an invoice from different directions based on the way you think about the problem:

- You can search for the customer first, then list their invoices.

- You can search for invoices by number or by company name.

- You can list invoices associated with a customer job.

### Print

After you post an invoice, you should print it and send it to your customer. To print an invoice use File Print Invoice menu item.

You can modify the appearance of the invoice, IE: add a company logo, etc. To do so, see the .

Invoices can also be printed from the main window by selecting Reports Business Reports Printable Invoice from the main menu. The resulting report window states that no valid invoice is selected. To select the invoice to print:

1. Use the Options Toolbar button or select Edit Report Options from the main menu.

2. Select the General tab of the report options dialog.

3. Click the Select button next to the Invoice Number field.

4. Search for the invoice as usual.

You can also print invoices from within the Process Payment dialog. See the for instructions on how to do so.

### Assign Starting Invoice Number

By default, &app; starts with invoice number 1 and increments from there. You can manually type an invoice number into the text box each time you create an invoice, but this gets tiring and sooner or later leads to duplicate numbers.

You can change the starting invoice number if it is important you. Use File Properties , access the Counters tab, change the Invoice number value to be one less than your desired starting invoice number and click the OK button or the Apply button.

## Customer Jobs

Customer Jobs are used to group multiple invoices and credit notes to the same customer. Use of the Customer Jobs feature is optional. The feature is useful when you have multiple jobs for the same customer, and would like to view all the invoices and credit notes related to a single job.

To use customer jobs, you must create them using the Business Customer New Job menu item. You will see the New Job window. The editable fields are:

- Job Info - Job Number (optional) - enter the number for this job. If left blank, a number will be chosen for you. See for more info.

- Job Info - Job Name - the name you want to assign to the new job.

- Owner Info - Customer - the customer for whom the job is created. If you remember the company name you entered in the New Customer window for this customer, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Customer window described in . Highlight the customer you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Owner Info - Billing ID - the customer’s reference to this job (e.g. their PO Number). This is the "Billing Identification" that they require to correlated your invoices with their order. The Billing ID you enter is used to set the billing id for new invoices associated with this job.

- Job Active - toggles this job being active or not. This is useful when you have many inactive jobs, since it is easier to search only among jobs that are marked active.

To edit an existing customer job, use the Business Customer Find Job menu item. Select the desired job in the search results, and click the View/Edit Job button.

To select from the invoices and credit notes associated with a given job, use Business Customer Find Job menu item. Select the desired job in the search results and click the View Invoices button. A window listing invoices and credit notes associated with this job appears. Select an invoice or credit note and click the View Invoice button to open an invoice editor in the main application window.

## Process Invoice Payment

Eventually, you will receive payment from your customers for outstanding invoices. To register these payments, use the Process Payment application found in Business Customer Process Payment .

There is an alternative way of assigning a payment to (one or more) invoices where the payment transaction already exists, say in the case where transactions have been imported from a bank. There is no way to assign a payment to an invoice during the import process, so this must be done after transactions have been imported.

This can best be done starting from the asset account register holding the imported payment transaction (like your bank account). In that account, select the payment, right-click (control-click for &mac;) and choose Assign as payment.... The payment window will pop-up, partly filled in with the information from the transaction. Fill in the missing information like the proper customer and invoice to complete the payment.

One caveat: the logic behind Assign as payment... won't properly detect credit note reimbursements and will wrongfully interpret such a transaction as a vendor bill.

The Process Payment application consists of:

- Payment Information - Customer - the customer who paid you. If you remember the company name you entered in the New Customer window for this customer, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Customer window described in . Highlight the customer you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Payment Information - Invoice - the invoice for which payment was received. If you remember the invoice ID, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Invoice window described in . Highlight the invoice you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Payment Information - Date - the date you you received payment.

- Payment Information - Amount - the amount of money received.

- Payment Information - Num - the check number.

- Payment Information - Memo - any comments about this payment.

- Post To - the A/Receivable account to which to post this transaction.

- Transfer Account - the account where the money will be deposited (a checking account for example).

### Over Payments or Pre-Payments

If a customer overpays an invoice or pays for goods or services before they have been invoiced, Process Payment for the total amount received. &app; will then keep track of the over-payment (or pre-payment) in the A/R account and you can use the residual when paying the next invoice.

### Partial Payments

Partial payments are possible too. Select the invoice to pay. &app; will automatically suggest that invoice's remaining balance as payment amount. Simply adjust that amount to what you want to pay.

### Writing Off a Bad Debt

Please check with your accountant to ensure the following is acceptable in your region.

The usual way to do this is to process a payment for the invoice to a BadDebt account. Such an account would be an expense account. However, in &app;, you can't process a payment for an invoice directly to an expense account, so it takes two steps:

1. Pay the invoice to an asset or liability account, such as your checking account.

2. Change the asset or liability account, in the non Accounts Receivable split of the payment transaction, to the BadDebt expense account.

Specifically

- Remove all transactions from the A/R account related to the invoice, except for the invoice's transaction itself. This includes any payment transactions, and transactions between your BadDebt and A/R account.

  In case the payment has associated lot link transactionsa, remove those as well.

  If all is well, your Process Payment window for this customer should list the invoice the customer won't pay, and no prepayments.

- Pay your invoice to an arbitrary asset or liability account. It can be your checking account. We will fix that in the next step.

- Open the account register for your A/R account. For this invoice there should now be one payment transaction. If you are using &app; 2.6.0 - 2.6.4 there will also be one lot link transactiona.

- Select the payment transaction and change the transfer account to your BadDebt account. Make sure to leave the transaction (eg by clicking on another transaction) to save the changes.

If all is well, your Process Payment window should still be clean: no pre-payments, and the bad debt invoice gone.

a &app; version

2.6.0 to 2.6.4

  created lot link transactions which show in the A/R account register. This came with its own set of subtle issues.

2.6.5

  had a flaw in the logic cleaning up the lot links.

It is recommended to upgrade to the latest (or at least 2.6.6) version, which fixes a lot of small problems. Once upgraded, please run Actions Check & Repair to clean up most of the lot link legacy. Don't forget to make a backup first just in case.

#### Distinction between Lot and Lot link

Lots

  are used internally for relating payments to invoices. Lots themselves are invisible in the account registers. To see them you need to open the lot viewer, which can be found in &mc.ac.vw-lots; while in any A/R or A/P account register. Select a lot to see the Splits in lot.

Lot links

  are transactions which you can see in your A/R and A/P accounts. They are unusual in the sense that all their splits are in one account (A/R or A/P). Each split in a lot link transaction is linked (hence the name) to an invoice or payment transaction by means of a lot.

See for more information.

## Changing the Invoice Appearance

The default Invoice style, as shown in , is fairly barren. The default invoice style leaves the top part of the form blank, so you can print on company letterhead paper. There are some things you can do to change invoice appearance.

Use File Properties to enter your Company information in the Business tab of the Book Options window. Some of the entered information is printed on the right side of invoices.

To add a customized background, heading banner or logo to invoices, modify the invoice style sheets. To do this, go to Edit Style Sheets and select the New button in the Select HTML Style Sheet window that will appear.

Give a Name to the new style sheet (e.g. Custom Invoice) and select the Fancy Template. When you click the OK button, the HTML Style Sheet Properties window is displayed. This window presents you five sections listed in the left pane: Colors, Fonts, General, Images, and Tables. The Colors section allows you to change the colors of various items of the invoice. The Fonts section lets you set font type and dimensions. The General section allows you to set the Preparer and Prepared for information, and to Enable Links. The Images section allows you to import graphics into the style sheet. The Tables section allows you to adjust the spacing around the tables which make up the invoice.

To include a company logo, banner heading and background image, use your favorite graphics application such as The Gimp or OpenOffice Draw to save the images in either GIF or PNG format. Then import them into the style sheet using the Images section described above.

The images are placed in the invoice as follows. The Background Tile is tiled to become the background image, the Heading Banner goes above the invoice text, and the Logo is placed in the upper left corner of the invoice to the left of the Heading Banner. You will probably have to try a few different sized images until you get the invoices to print nicely. Some sizing suggestions are that the Logo should be 1 square cm (~0.5 inch), and the Heading Banner should be 15 cm (~6 inches) wide and 1 cm (~0.5 inch) tall.

With the style sheet configured, when you print the invoice, you select the style sheet to use from the Options menu.

## Accounts Payable

&app; has an integrated accounts payable system. As with Accounts Receivable you must have an Accounts Payable account set up under Liabilities for each currency in which you will issue invoices. The Accounts Payable accounts accrue the amounts you owe to others, so bills credit these accounts and payments and credit memos debit these accounts. Generally you do not directly work with this account but use the four integrated &app; A/P application components. The A/P components are available from the Business Vendor sub-menu.

These A/P components are:

- Vendors are people or companies from which you buy products or services on credit.

- Bills represent the physical bills vendors send to request payment from you. A bill contains an itemized list of things you purchased.

- Jobs (optional) is where you register Vendor Jobs. Jobs are a mechanism by which you can group multiple bills from a particular vendor.

- Process Payments is where you register payments to a vendor to whom you owe money.

The following sections introduce the individual Accounts Payable application components.

## Vendors

A vendor is a company or person from whom you purchase goods or services. Vendors must be registered within the A/P system.

### New

To register a new vendor, select the Business Vendor New Vendor menu item. Fill in general information about the vendor, such as Company Name, Address, Phone, Fax, etc. Below is a list of the other options:

- Identification - Vendor Number - can be any number by which you would like to refer to this vendor. You may leave it blank and a number will be chosen automatically. See for more info

- Identification - Active - differentiates active vendors from inactive ones. This is useful when you have many past vendors, and you want to see only those marked active.

- Payment Address - Name - is the contact name of the person to receive payments you make.

- Notes - records any additional comments about the vendor. Use it to track names of contact people within the vendor’s company, for example.

- Payment Information - Currency - specifies the payment currency for this vendor. It will default to the default currency set in Preferences

  All Bills and Credit Notes will be denominated in this currency and &app; will require an Accounts Payable account in this currency.

- Payment Information - Terms - specifies the default payment terms for this vendor. Payment terms must be preregistered using Business Billing Terms .

- Payment Information - Tax Included - specifies if tax is included in bills from this vendor. You can choose Yes, No, or Use Global.

  - Yes means that tax is already included in amounts on bills.

  - No means tax is not included.

  - Use Global means to use the setting made in the global preferences accessible through Edit Preferences ( Gnucash Preferences on &mac;).

- Payment Information - Tax Table - specifies a default tax table to apply to bills from this vendor. Tax tables must be registered using the Business Tax Table menu item.

### Find and Edit

To search for an existing vendor, use the Business Vendor Find Vendor window. You select a vendor to View/Edit from the results of the search. This window is also used to look up a vendor when entering bills and processing payments.

If many vendors match the search criteria you provide, the search can be refined by running an additional search within the current results. The current result set is searched when the Refine Current Search radio button is selected. In fact, &app; selects this option for you after you run the initial search.

If the vendor you are searching for does not match the supplied search criteria, change the search criteria, click the New Search radio button and then the Find button. The relevant step is the New Search selection. If the vendor is not in the result of the original search, and you only search within this set, the vendor cannot be found, regardless of new search criteria.

To return a list of all registered active vendors, set the search criterion to matches regex, and place a single dot . in the text field area. Make sure Search only active data is checked, then click Find. The regular expression . means to match anything.

## Bills

A bill is a request for payment you receive from a vendor. &app; can track bills.

A credit note is the document you receive from a vendor to correct products or services rendered that you were incorrectly charged for on a bill. &app; can generate and track credit notes via the same menu entries as bills.

This section applies to both bills and credit notes. In order to avoid repeating everything twice and to keep the text easier to read it will refer only to bills. You can apply it equally to credit notes. Only where the behaviour of credit notes differs from bills this will be explicitly mentioned.

### New

When you receive a bill from a vendor and want to enter it into &app;, you must create a new bill. To create a new bill use the Business Vendor New Bill menu item, and fill in the resulting window appropriately.

- Bill Information - Type - the type of vendor document to create - either a bill or a credit note.

- Bill Information - Bill ID (optional) - the identification number of the invoice as emitted by the vendor (IE: the vendor’s internal number for this invoice).

- Bill Information - Date Opened - the date the Invoice was emitted by the vendor.

- Billing Information - Vendor - the issuing vendor. If you remember the company name you entered in the New Vendor window for this vendor, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Vendor window described in . Highlight the vendor you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Billing Information - Job (optional) - associates a vendor job (see ) with this bill. If you remember the job name you entered in the New Job window for this job, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Job window. This window is very similar to the one described in . Highlight the job you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Billing Information - Billing ID (optional) - the vendor’s ID for the bill (e.g.: their invoice #).

- Billing Information - Terms - the pay back terms agreement for this bill. A list of registered terms is available within the pop up menu. If you specified a default value for the selected vendor, this field is initialized with the default.

- Default Chargeback Project - Customer (optional) - the customer to associate with this bill. This is used to charge your customer later.

- Default Chargeback Project - Job (optional) - the customer job to associate with this bill.

When you click the OK the Edit Bill window opens.

### Edit

From the Edit Bill window you can enter an itemized list of goods and services you purchased, in a manner similar to how the account register works. For credit notes you enter an itemized list of goods and services the vendor refunded instead.

Saved column layout works a bit differently in invoices from the account registers: Layouts are not saved for each invoice; instead a layout can be saved as a default for invoices to override the calculated widths using the View>Use as Default Layout for Vendor Documents and the calculated widths restored as the default with View>Reset Default Layout for Vendor Documents.

There are 12 columns in the Invoice Entries area:

- Date - The date this item was sold.

- Invoiced? - X means the item is attached to this invoice, an empty box means the item is not attached to this invoice. If the box is empty you can attach the item to the invoice by first selecting the item row and then clicking in this box.

- Description (optional) - is what the item or service is called.

- Action (optional) - is a user defined field. You can place Cost Center information here, or use one of the 3 predefined actions, Hours, Material, or Project.

- Expense Account - selects the expense account to charge for this item.

- Quantity - tracks how many of the items you bought.

- Unit Price - is the unit price of the item.

- Taxable? - is this item taxable? X means yes, a blank field means no. You can click the field to toggle the setting.

- Tax Included? - has the tax already been included in the unit price? X means yes, a blank field means no.

- Tax Table (optional) - this is a pop up menu of all the available tax tables. If the item is taxable and tax has not been included in the unit price, then this tax table is used to compute the amount of tax.

- Subtotal (uneditable) - computed subtotal for this item (less tax)

- Billable - is this item billable to the chargeback customer/job?

When you have finished entering all the items, Post the bill.

### Post

When you finish editing a bill, you should Post the bill. You do not have to post the bill, you can close it and return to it later. You have to post the bill eventually. Posting a bill places its transactions into an accounts payable account. The Post Bill window appears and asks you to enter information:

- Post Date - specifies the date for the transactions entered into the accounts payable account.

- Due Date - is the date on which payment for the bill is expected.

  - If you specified payment terms when you created the bill, the date is calculated according to selected terms, and the entry field is insensitive.

  - If you did not specify payment terms, enter the expected payment due date here.

- Description - is an arbitrary description. When bill transactions are placed in the accounts payable account, this description is entered in the memo field of those transactions.

- Post To Account - selects the accounts payable account in which bill transactions are posted. You can select the account from a list of existing A/Payable accounts.

- Accumulate Splits - determines if bill items which transfer to the same account are combined into a single split for that account or entered individually. For the sample bill for Letterhead and Envelopes, the setting affects post results as follows:

  - Checked (splits are accumulated) - a single transfer of $100.00 to the Expenses:Office Supplies account is recorded.

  - Not checked - the transaction created in the A/Payable account, shows two transfers to Expenses:Office Supplies account $75.00 and $25.00. The memo fields in the splits indicate the purchase of Letterhead and Envelopes (the item descriptions entered on the bill) respectively.

### Find

To find an existing bill, use the Business Vendor Find Bill menu item. From the results of the search, you can select a bill to edit, or view.

Before you can edit a posted bill, you will need to Unpost it.

There are other ways to access an existing bill. These are similar to accessing invoices for your customers. See for more information.

## Vendor Jobs

Vendor Jobs are used to group multiple bills and credit notes from a single vendor. Use of the vendor jobs feature is optional. The feature is useful when you have multiple jobs for the same vendor, and would like to view all the bills and credit notes for a single job.

To use vendor jobs, you must create them using the Business Vendor New Job menu item. You will see the New Job window. The editable fields are:

- Job Info - Job Number (optional) - enter the number for this job. If left blank, a number will be chosen for you.

- Job Info - Job Name - the name you want to assign to the new job.

- Owner Info - Vendor - the vendor for whom the job is created.

- Owner Info - Billing ID - the vendor’s reference to this job (e.g. their PO Number).

- Job Active - toggles this job being active or not. This is useful when you have many inactive jobs, since it is easier to search only among jobs that are marked active.

To edit an existing vendor job, use the Business Vendor Find Job menu item. Select the desired job in the search results, and click the View/Edit Job button.

To select from the bills and credit notes associated with a given job, use the Business Vendor Find Job menu item. Select the desired job in the search results and click the View Invoices button. A window listing bills and credit notes associated with this job appears. Select a bill or credit note and click the View Invoice button to open a bill editor in the main application window.

## Process Bill Payment

Eventually, you need to pay your bills. To do so, use the Process Payment application found in Business Vendor Process Payment .

There is an alternative way of assigning a payment to (one or more) bills where the payment transaction already exists, say in the case where transactions are imported from a bank.

This can best be done starting from the asset account register holding the imported payment transaction (like your bank account). In that account, select the payment, right-click (control-click for &mac;) and choose Assign as payment.... The payment window will pop-up, partly filled in with the information from the transaction. Fill in the missing information like the proper vendor and bill to complete the payment.

One caveat: the logic behind Assign as payment... won't properly detect credit note reimbursements and will wrongfully interpret such a transaction as a customer invoice.

The Process Payment application consists of:

- Payment Information - Vendor - the vendor you wish to pay. If you remember the company name you entered in the New Vendor window for this vendor, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Vendor window described in . Highlight the vendor you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button.

- Payment Information - Bill - the bill you wish to pay. If you remember the bill ID, start to type it in this field and &app; will try auto complete it for you. Else, press the Select... button to access the Find Bill window described in . Highlight the bill you are looking for with a click in the search results, then press the Select button in the search window.

- Payment Information - Date - the date you wish to make the payment, normally the current date.

- Payment Information - Amount - the amount of money to transfer in this payment.

- Payment Information - Num - the check number.

- Payment Information - Memo - any comments about this payment.

- Post To - the A/Payable account to post this transaction.

- Transfer Account - the account from which money for the payments comes from, such as a checking account.

### Over Payments or Pre-Payments

If you wish to overpay an invoice or pay for goods or services before they have been invoiced, Process Payment for the total amount payed. &app; will then keep track of the over-payment (or pre-payment) in the A/P account and you can use the residual in the future.

### Partial Payments

You may wish to partially pay a bill. Select the bill to pay. &app; will automatically suggest that bill's remaining balance as payment amount. Simply adjust that amount to what you want to pay.

## Employees

&app; can help your company by tracking employees. You can register a , existing employees, create and .

Expense vouchers are used to reimburse employees for authorized expenses (f.e. travel, parking, food etc...). Employee credit notes are the opposite of expense vouchers.

### New Employee

To register a new employee, select the Business Employee New Employee menu item. The New Employee window will open with two tabs:

#### Employee tab

- Identification - Employee Number - can be any number by which you would like to refer to this employee. You may leave it blank and a number will be chosen automatically. See for more info.

- Identification - Username (Mandatory) - a unique username to identify the employee.

- Identification - Active (Optional) - differentiates active employees from inactive ones. This is useful when you have many past employees, and you want to see only those marked Active.

- Payment Address - Name (Mandatory) - the full name of the employee.

- Payment Address - Address (Mandatory) - the address of the employee.

- Payment Address - Phone, Fax, Email (Optional)- other optional contact information for the employee.

- Interface - Language (Optional) -

- Payment Information - Terms (Optional) - specifies the default payment terms for this employee. Payment terms must be preregistered using Business Billing Terms .

- Billing - Default Hours per Day (Optional) -

- Billing - Default Rate (Optional) -

- Billing - Currency - specifies the billing currency for this employee. It will default to the default currency set in Preferences

  All expense vouchers and credit notes for this employee will be denominated in this currency and &app; will require an Accounts Payable account in this currency.

- Billing - Credit Account (Optional) -

#### Access Control tab

- Access Control List

### Find and Edit

To search for an existing employee, use the Business Employee Find Employee... menu. You select an employee to View/Edit from the results of the search. This window is also used to look up an employee when entering voucher and processing payments.

If many employees match the search criteria you provide, the search can be refined by running an additional search within the current results. The current result set is searched when the Refine Current Search radio button is selected. In fact, &app; selects this option for you after you run the initial search.

If the employee you are searching for does not match the supplied search criteria, change the search criteria, click the New Search radio button and then the Find button. The relevant step is the New Search selection. If the employee is not in the result of the original search, and you only search within this set, the employee cannot be found, regardless of new search criteria.

To return a list of all registered active employees, set the search criterion to matches regex, and place a single dot . in the text field area. Make sure Search only active data is checked, then click Find. The regular expression . means to match anything.

### New Expense Voucher/Credit Note

To register a new expense voucher/ Credit Note, select the Business Employee New Expense Voucher... menu item. The New Expense Voucher window will open. You can enter the following data:

- Voucher information - Type (Optional) - select if you are entering a Voucher or a credit note.

- Voucher information - Voucher ID (Optional) - can be any number by which you would like to refer to this voucher. You may leave it blank and a number will be chosen automatically. See for more info.

- Voucher information - Date opened - the date of the voucher. Click on the button on the right of the date to open a calendar.

- Billing information - Employee (Mandatory) - the employee to which the voucher refers.

  The field supports auto-completion so if you start typing &app; will try to complete the text automatically using existing employees name. You can also press the button Select... to open the Find Employee window.

- Billing information - Billing ID (Optional) - the identification number of the document (f.e. the bill number for a dinner).

- Billing information - Terms (Optional) - the pay back terms agreement for this bill. A list of registered terms is available within the pop up menu.

- Default chargeback project - Customer (Optional) - the Customer to which the voucher refers.

  The field supports auto-completion so if you start typing &app; will try to complete the text automatically using an existing Customer name. You can also press the button Select... to open the Find Customer window.

- Default chargeback project - Job (Optional) - the Customer Job to which the voucher refers.

  you can type in this field only if there are one or more jobs registered in &app; belonging to the selected Customer.

  The field supports auto-completion so if you start typing &app; will try to complete the text automatically using an existing Customer name. You can also press the button Select... to open the Find Customer window.

- Notes - records any additional comments about the voucher/credit note.

### Find Expense Voucher/Credit Note

To search for an existing Expense Voucher, use the Business Employee Find Expense Voucher... menu item. You select an Expense Voucher to View/Edit from the results of the search. This window is also used to look up an expense voucher when entering vouchers and processing payments.

If many expense vouchers match the search criteria you provide, the search can be refined by running an additional search within the current results. The current result set is searched when the Refine Current Search radio button is selected. In fact, &app; selects this option for you after you run the initial search.

If the expense voucher you are searching for does not match the supplied search criteria, change the search criteria, click the New Search radio button and then the Find button. The relevant step is the New Search selection. If the expense voucher is not in the result of the original search, and you only search within this set, the voucher cannot be found, regardless of new search criteria.

To return a list of all expense vouchers, set the search criterion to matches regex, and place a single dot . in the text field area. Make sure Search only active data is checked, then click Find. The regular expression . means to match anything.

### Edit

From the Edit Expense Voucher window you can enter an itemized list of goods and services the employee bought or performed for the job, in a manner similar to how the account register works. For credit notes you enter an itemized list of goods and services charged back to the employee instead.

Saved column layout works a bit differently in invoices from the account registers: Layouts are not saved for each invoice; instead a layout can be saved as a default for invoices to override the calculated widths using the View>Use as Default Layout for Employee Documents and the calculated widths restored as the default with View>Reset Default Layout for Employee Documents.

There are 10 columns in the Entries area:

- Date - The date this item was sold.

- Invoiced? - X means the item is attached to this invoice, an empty box means the item is not attached to this invoice. If the box is empty you can attach the item to the invoice by first selecting the item row and then clicking in this box.

- Description (optional) - is what the item or service is called.

- Action (optional) - is a user defined field. You can place Cost Center information here, or use one of the 3 predefined actions, Hours, Material, or Project.

- Expense Account - selects the expense account to charge for this item.

- Quantity - tracks how many of the items you bought.

- Unit Price - is the unit price of the item.

- Subtotal (uneditable) - computed subtotal for this item (less tax)

- Billable - is this item billable to the chargeback customer/job?

- Payment - How the employee was reimbursed. You might enter a check or petty cash voucher number here.

When you have finished entering all the items, Post the voucher.