openerp-expert-accounting team mailing list archive

[David Mitchell <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Experts,

A quick question for the group regarding opening balances and the
treatment of open invoices (customer and supplier).

When making opening entries customer beginning balances (which are
essentially open customer invoices - which show up as Receivables here
in the US), OpenERP allows users to load up open balances through
accounting opening journal entries (default open credit is the contra
account), and associate a reference # (the outstanding invoice
number). This approach is lacking as actual invoices are not created
and administrators/financial staff lose critical information on the
invoice such as payment terms, but the customer's open outstanding
balance is technically correct. Just not in the ideal form for most
CFOs here.

While many other accounting systems in the US do this - particularly
small systems (quickbooks and peachtree), most clients would like to
be able to import the actual outstanding open invoices and retain the
downstream "workflow" process. Bringing in the invoices as "Draft"
won't work because the account_move_create() workflow process creates
an entry into Sales Income (which has already been recognized in the
previous ERP system entry). So double booking of Sales Income occurs
in this instance. And of course you can't import invoices with "State"
as "open" in v6. Creating and booking Draft invoices to a new Journal
specifically for this purpose with the credit account being the
offset/contra opening balance default credit account/held off balance
sheet as part of the Opening entries doesn't work either because the
system blocks booking to such an account because it is held as a view.

So, as part of bringing a new client onto OpenERP and entering Opening
Balances + bringing in actual open customer invoices + open payables
has anyone defined a process/code to do this effectively, or is
everyone just accepting that open balances on a partner account can
only be brought in and not actual "open" invoices. If you do bring
them in did you use a special module that is in the "ecosystem
somewhere", or is this an issue for others as well.

If we had this "capability" in OpenERP we would certainly see this as
an advantage over some of the other Accounting/ERP systems in our
market that lose individual open invoice details (e.g. Payment Terms)
when bringing in Opening Balances. Accountants would really like this
. . . per our controllers on our team.

We feel we may need to modify the Opening Entries capabilities in
OpenERP, create/modify the existing workflow on invoices, or a
combination of them both to handle this, but we are wondering if
anyone has addressed it previously to jumpstart this development.

Thanks as always for a few cycles of your time/thinking about this.