A/R transfers

I am keeping books for a property owner's association. Each member pays a monthly fee of $50. When I first set it up years ago, that was the only charge, so I just set up 30 Customer accounts without a job attached, and had a memorized transaction invoice each month. Since then, we have initiated other projects, so I began to set up jobs under each customer. I wanted to be able to track the balances of the Monthly Fees too, so I set up a job for that as well. Now I have some credit balances that I cannot seem to use or transfer. Example:

Customer:Job Account:Subaccount Credit (Balance)

------------- ------------------ ---------------- Smith Members:Monthly Fees $362.08 Smith:Monthly Members:Monthly Fees ($462.08)

When I go to receive payment for Smith, this is what I see. So Smith's overall balance is $100 (correct), but it is all in the Monthly Fees job, which shows a balance of $462.08. I cannot use the credits in the first line to pay the second line, and if I try to do a G/L transfer via a "dummy" asset account (as you know, you cannot transfer directly from one A/R account to another), that does not work either. Any help greatly appreciated.

Reply to
steve.swain
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Get rid of the jobs. You have made what should have been very simple overly complex by introducing them in the first place.

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Reply to
Allan Martin

Can't do. There are a number of projects (jobs) that are being funded by various subsets of the membership, and we need to track the expenses/contributions for each of these separately. That is why I wanted to break out the monthly fee in the first place -- it was confusing when you added up the balances of all the jobs and got a different number than the customer's overall balance (the diff being the monthly fee). Plus, I need to track finance charges on each separate job.

Reply to
steve.swain

Create a new "bank" account called something like "Clearing & Transfer". "Write a Check" from this account to A/R to a job with a credit balance; this will create a debit entry similar to an invoice. Next "Receive Payment" for this job for $0.00 and apply the credit to the "check". Finally, "Receive Payment" to the Clearing account for the job with the outstanding debit balance. Done properly, the Clearing account will always have a zero balance.

It can be done with journal entries instead of "checks" and "receive payments" if you prefer. I don't know why this didn't work for you, I have used it without a problem. You need the same number of transactions, whether they are journal entries or checks/payments.

Smith's

directly

Reply to
!-!

Thanks for the help. For some reason, it turns out that setting up my dummy account as a Bank account works. I had it set up as an Other Asset account, which had worked in the past, but was not working in this particular situation. Thanks again.

Reply to
steve.swain

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