About invoicing making GnuCash show assets (accounts receivable) when the dues are billed (or pledges receivable), I don't see why that would be much of a problem. Couldn't that be addressed by your entering a journal entry to zero out the asset balance and reverse the income recognized, whenever financial reports are to be issued, and especially at the end of a reporting year?
The financial statements don't have to be accurate every day, it is only at closing dates when adjusting entries need to be made. For an organization which uses cash accounting on a daily basis, e.g. perhaps recording revenue only when cash is received to avoid having to create invoices in the accounting system, the adjusting entry at the end of the year would be to go in the opposite direction, to recognize some amount of accounts receivable for work done already in December. For example there is a for-profit company i know that doesn't bother to invoice because they always require payment from the customer before they will hand over their completed custom product. And while it might again come across to some as fraudulent or lying or the like, but it happens to be okay by GAAP to make this entry dated December 31 at a later true date, after the amounts are known from the actual payments being received during January, so that the prior year financial statements give a correct picture. Others adjusting entries are to recognize depreciation if any, to recognize any extra accounts payable or receivable or prepaid expenses or unearned revenues (where cash has been received from a customer but the work hasn't yet been done) that one knows about but which haven't been recorded yet. These might only be done at quarterly closes or only at end of year. It simply is not necessary for invoicing status to be correct at every moment. About invoicing members of a nonprofit, I hadn't even thought about using accounting system to ask them for their annual fees. Possibly it could be efficient to do that way for some nonprofits, but in nonprofits that I know the membership info is kept in a separate spreadsheet, with address list used in a mail-merge (at least I hope they don't handle each new letter individually), handled by membership person(s) instead of accountant. So there is a whole lot of duplication to the accounting system where each payment received must be entered from scratch, and possibilities for errors. "Membership database" softwares exist that allow members to pay dues at a website in a way that doesn't require separate accounting entries, and allows them to update their info and allows many reports, and supports much more. Including one true freeware package developed under Gnu Public license or similar that sounded good and I would be interested to try, but it has warning that its developer-programmer no longer will provide support (maybe it was one of those reviewed at https://blog.capterra.com/top-7-free-open-source-membership-management-software-products/ ?). It would be _awesome_ if someone could take over one of these and make it compatible with GnuCash! Don _______________________________________________ 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.
