Payables and Receivables payment/aging?

[tommyk]

Has anyone implemented any kind of a/r and a/p aging and payment
scheme for accrual accounting in ledger? You know the kind of thing:

Water (say) bill received on May 31st for water consumed in May. Bill
due for payment by June 30th. You'd have something like:

2010/05/31 * (-) May Bill from Water Inc
expenses:utllities:water $100
liabilities:accounts-payable

2010/06/30 * (-) Pay Water Inc May Bill
assets:bank -$100
liabilities:accounts-payable

However, there are at least three things missing (versus, say, a
QuickBooks implementation)

a. There's nothing about aging; i.e. nothing in that first entry about
payment terms (the fact that the bill is due within 30 days in this
case)

b. There's nothing tying that particular $100 payment on June 30th to
the water supplier. Now this could be fixed by using a/p subaccounts.
So instead of liabilities:accounts-payable" I'd use
"liabilities:accounts-payable:water-inc". But even if that was done:

c. There's nothing tying that specific payment to that specific bill
from the water supplier

I imagine this is beyond the scope of the core ledger engine, but I
wondered if anyone had looked at maybe using comment fields to add
these kind of a/p and a/r functions?

thanks,
Tommy

[Zack Williams]

> b. There's nothing tying that particular $100 payment on June 30th to
> the water supplier. Now this could be fixed by using a/p subaccounts.
> So instead of liabilities:accounts-payable" I'd use
> "liabilities:accounts-payable:water-inc". But even if that was done:

Just to throw out an example

2009/10/08 * Invoice
Assets:Accounts Receivable:Customer Name
Customers:Customer Name:Invoice:Services -270.00

2009/10/12 * Check #12345
Customers:Customer Name:Payments:Check 270.00
Customers:Customer Name:Equity -270.00
Assets:Accounts Receivable:Customer Name -270.00
Assets:Checking Deposits

This way, I can tell who owes me what, puts amounts in my AR, then
checking deposits (different from checking - transfers from checking
deposits to checking happen when I enter a deposit slip), and I can
balance each individual customer's account.

Doesn't do aging, or tie bills/payments together like you're asking,
but it works for my purposes.

- Zack

[Simon Michael]

No explicit aging, but here's how I identify client and specific invoice:

2010/03/04 client A invoice
assets:accounts receivable:client A:2010304 $900
income:consulting:client A $-900

2010/03/30 client A payment
assets:accounts receivable:client A:2010304 $-900
assets:bank:wells fargo:checking $900

[tommyk]

Ah, that could work. Effectively a subaccount per invoice, right?

And ten I wonder if aging could be achieved by simply encoding the due
date in the invoice number. So your 2010304 would become
2010304_20100630 (i.e. due on June 30th). Then I could envisage an
aging report being produced (maybe with some perl/python-ish post
processing of a core ledger report) to find all invoice "subaccounts"
with non-zero balances where an age is calculated simply by taking the
difference of the date suffix with today's date (or some specified
"effective" date).

Tommy

[John Wiegley]

On Jun 26, 2010, at 2:55 PM, tommyk wrote:

> b. There's nothing tying that particular $100 payment on June 30th to
> the water supplier. Now this could be fixed by using a/p subaccounts.
> So instead of liabilities:accounts-payable" I'd use
> "liabilities:accounts-payable:water-inc". But even if that was done:
>
> c. There's nothing tying that specific payment to that specific bill
> from the water supplier

You can annotate commodities with this information:

2010/05/31 * (-) May Bill from Water Inc

expenses:utllities:water $100 (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010]
liabilities:accounts-payable

2010/06/30 * (-) Pay Water Inc May Bill

assets:bank -$100 (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010]
liabilities:accounts-payable = $0

To see exactly which bills haven't been paid yet:

ledger bal --lots accounts-payable

This is with 3.0.

John

[Martin Michlmayr]

* John Wiegley <jo...@newartisans.com> [2010-06-27 21:41]:

> 2010/05/31 * (-) May Bill from Water Inc
> expenses:utllities:water $100 (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010]

I don't think I've seen this (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010] syntax
before. Can you explain what it does?
--
Martin Michlmayr
http://www.cyrius.com/

[John Wiegley]

On Jul 5, 2010, at 12:06 PM, Martin Michlmayr wrote:

>> 2010/05/31 * (-) May Bill from Water Inc
>> expenses:utllities:water $100 (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010]
>
> I don't think I've seen this (Bill: Water Inc) [may 2010] syntax
> before. Can you explain what it does?

You can annotate commodities in three ways, which may all be combined:

$100 {10 EUR} # Price paid for those $
$100 [2010/05/01] # Date when they were acquired
$100 (Note) # An arbitrary note to identify the 'lot'

These are all optional, and in fact Ledger auto-generates the first two
whenever it sees a commodity exchange take place. The only one that has
real meaning is the first. When you later exchange a commodity that has
a price annotation, the difference between annotated price and exchange
price will determine the capital gain/loss.

John