How To Assign Payments Received Properly In GnuCash?

Question

What is the "proper" way to make sure that a payment I receive for an invoice is "assigned" to that particular invoice? (I feel like many payments I have received don't get assigned to an invoice and instead it looks like the client has not paid me).

When I receive a check from a customer whom I previously sent an invoice, I go to the customer report for that customer, click on the link "Invoice" for that invoice, then click on the Pay Invoice button (very far right side).

I then do a customer report and see that there is no balance (meaning all the invoices have been paid).

But I swear at some later time those payments become "lost" in the system, meaning if I do a customer report two or three months later on, it would show that the customer has a balance due.

Am I not processing the payments the right way?

Answer 1

When I receive a check from a customer whom I previously sent an invoice, I go to the customer report for that customer, click on the link "Invoice" for that invoice, then click on the Pay Invoice button (very far right side).

I then do a customer report and see that there is no balance (meaning all the invoices have been paid).

I don't process invoices using the same method you do. Instead I go to Business -> Customer -> Process Payment. From there I can select the applicable customer, and a list of unpaid invoices will come up. I've never experienced the issue you've described.

On a related topic: are you posting your invoices? From experience that has caused issues for me; when you post the invoice it should show up in your Accounts Receivable (or whichever account you've designated), and after you process the payment the A/R should go down accordingly. When posting your invoice, you specify which account it gets posted to:

So that account should show a balance once you have posted it:

Then, when a client pays you, your cash will go up, and A/R will go down.

Answer 2

V old post, but it came top of my search and this may be the correct answer: Unposting and reposting a paid invoice loses its payment

EDIT

Unposting and reposting a paid invoice loses its payment

As of gnucash 2.6.0, when you unpost a paid invoice (or bill) and then repost it again after making corrections the invoice is no longer marked as paid. These have to be manually linked together again.

Unfortunately gnucash 2.6.0 to 2.6.2 contained bugs that prevented this. In those versions your only option is to

delete the payment
delete the accompanying lot link transaction from the AR account
reapply the payment

This is cumbersome so the recommended alternative is to upgrade to gnucash 2.6.3 or higher. As of that version here is how you can fix this

Open Business->Customer->Process Payment...
Select the correct customer and optionally also the correct "Post To" account (usually the latter is ok by default)
Now select both the unpaid invoice and the corresponding pre-payment
This should set the amount to 0 and the transfer accounts should get greyed out
Click Ok

If the amount is not 0 that means the unpaid amount of the invoice doesn't match the amount of the pre-payment. How to proceed depends on the situation.

Perhaps there was a second pre-payment to select ? You can do so and with all the lines selected click Ok.
Or the invoice wasn't fully paid before either ? Then manually set the amount to 0 to indicate no additional payment (apart from the

pre-payment) should be entered now. Or you have an additional payment to enter at this time ? You can set the amount to that of the additional payment and indicate which account was used for this payment.