Why do the costs on a journal entry show in the net sales column?

[Patch]

@lubos

Basically, once we allow to select customer or supplier on payment/receipt forms, we will be able to tell whether a receipt is a sale or refunded purchase. Just by looking at the type of contact the receipt is linked to. Is it linked to a supplier? It’s a refund!

To do that you would have to:

• Combine the customer and supplier database

• Get the user to choose the correct entry from a list containing all customers and all suppliers. I’m not sure this enhances the user interface as when entering the data the user will already know if they are looking for a customer or supplier so would likely prefer the option to display only customers or suppliers.

• Given companies maybe both customers and suppliers, to select the correct entry the list would need to show if it was a supplier or customer entry.

An alternative is to recognize Manager can mostly determine from context if the transaction pertains to a sale or a purchase. Journal entries are the one exception because they are used to correct errors elsewhere and operate at a lower / more manual user level. Consistent with this, giving the user lower level control would be appropriate. By which I mean, on and only on journal entries allow explicitly specifying if the tax code pertains to a sale or purchase.

A possible user interface is if a tax code is applied to a line in a journal entry, allow specifying if it is a “Sale” or “Purchase”.

@Tut

The use case does not even require an invoice. It can be handled as a cash transaction, although the same philosophy applies with invoices

Unfortunately it currently can’t be done with a cash transaction, see Goods return (Cash sale/purchase) causes Gross Sales error