20130928 (Saturday, 28 September 2013)

Clearable accounts

I first needed to do some vocabulary research. Imagine some contract which causes monthly anticipated payments followed by a quarterly invoice which leads to an adjusting payment:

Transaction

Debit

Credit

Match

January payment

100

X

February payment

100

X

March payment

100

X

March invoice

655.75

X

Adjusting payment

355.75

X

April payment

200

At some moment the system (automatically) or the user (manually) must insert those Xes in the in the Match column to indicate that these movements should be “grouped” together and that the March invoice is paid.

In French this action is called “Lettrage des écritures comptables”, in (Belgian) German I call it “Buchungen lettrieren”.

According to Jack Dunwell in a discussion thread at proz.com this is called “Cross referencing the invoice against its clearing credit notes and cash.” Merci, Jack.

I’d extrapolate this to say that a “clearable account” is an acccount which is expected to require this action. Not every account is clearable.

Partner accounts are clearable per se: if you pay or receive some money to or from a business partner, then you must somehow show why you did that.

But also general accounts can require clearing. For examople:

  • 4110 T.V.A. due

  • 4111 T.V.A. déductible

  • 5800 Virements internes

That’s why Lino now has an attribute “Clearable” “Lettrable” (“Lettrierbar”) per general account to designate such accounts. (I had a temptation to solve this by adding a field partner to accounts.Account. If this field is non-empty, the account is “clearable”. But that would be overkill and difficult to explain.)

New tables DuePaymentsByAccount.

Extended the Match class so that it works also per account. Which has the beneficient side effect af no longer ignoring the account when building the matches for a partner. Imagine for example a partner who is both customer and supplier and for whom we had exactly three operations:

Sales invoice      1000
Puchases invoice         700
Payment                  300

Lino should not allow to clear this as is, but should require to add a journal entry “Clearing”:

Sales invoice      1000      S
Puchases invoice         700 P
Payment                  300 P
Clearing                1000 S
Clearing           1000      P

TODO:

  • context menu in row

  • selecting more than one row

  • adapt tests because number of fields has changed

  • be able to fill from DocItems

I checked in nevertheless because it seems to work and is so beautiful!

Actions of the Site ‣ Info window

The Site ‣ Info window (about.About) had a useless action “Detail”, and clicking the Print button there caused an internal server error. Fixed. BasePrintAction now overrides attach_to_actor to disable itself when lino.modlib.system is not installed.

Worked a bit on https://www.lino-framework.org/user/templates_api.html.