Thinking further about Journal entry level vs Journal line item level specification of Sale/Purchase and Customer/Supplier. I’m not sure it is possible to reliably specify these at the Journal entry level.
To explain, consider a relatively simple example: A sole trader goes to one of his suppliers
- Makes a “cash” purchase
- Pays an outstanding invoice
- Uses his personal credit card instead of the his work card
- Chooses to later enter the transaction as a journal entry rather than a net zero value “Payment”
With Journal entry level specification of Sale/Purchase and Customer/Supplier, the edit screen would look something like
The issue which concerns me with this approach is how Manager will know how to update “Suppler 1” reports to incorporate the transaction described it this journal entry.
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The second line item is payment for a “Cash” sale so should ideally be added to the “Suppler Summary” and “Suppler Statements (transactions)”.
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The third line item has Type = purchase, and Supplier = “Supplier 1” specified in the account selection. Tax codes are specified in the invoice. Having the ability to specify anything else would at least be potentially confusing both to the user and program behavior.
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The first line item is the equivalent of the bank account specification in a Receipt/Payment and should have no effect on the supplier’s reports.
In contrast with line item level specification of Sale/Purchase and Customer/Supplier the above line item properties would be explicitly shown:
It maybe possible to code Manager to make a good guess at these relationships most of the time but journal entries are used for all sorts of things including correcting prior errors. I worry there is a risk Manager would get it wrong some of the time so recreate the current problem.
Edit
Note suggesting line item level specification in Journal entries rather than transaction level is the opposite conclusion I came earlier in Why do the costs on a journal entry show in the net sales column? - #56 by Patch I think transaction level is probably more efficient on average for sale/purchase specification, but I’m less convinced when identifying entries to add to supplier/customers reports.