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Tim Ingalls

I ran across this problem and wanted to post the answer here in case this happens to others. The symptom is that expense tickets do not create an invoice that can be paid from the Accounting / Payments menu.

  1. An employee or manager creates an expense ticket from the HR menu.
  2. A manager or user with proper permissions approves and post the accounting entries.
  3. Draft journal entries are created to transfer funds between GL accounts.
  4. No invoice is created that can be paid with the Accounting / Supplier Payments or Write Checks menu. When you create a new supplier payment and select the contact from the dropdown menu, no invoice shows up below in the Payment Information detail lines.

The solution is listed below.

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Tim Ingalls
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There are two reasons that I have found for this problem.

The first reason is that you are choosing the OpenERP user instead of the contact for the employee. This can happen if the OpenERP user first name and last name (Settings / Users) exactly match the employee's first name and last name found in the Human Resources / Employees / Home Address page. To keep them straight, I append some text to the user name. For example, I add "(user)" (without the quotes) after the name in the user account so that tag shows up in the list of payees in the Supplier Payments page and can be differentiated from the "employee" contact. So if I did an expense ticket for the employee Joe Smith, I would see both "Joe Smith" and "Joe Smith (user)" in the dropdown selection box, and I could select the entry for "Joe Smith" to make my payment.

The second reason was really tricky to find. The problem comes from the Employee setup page. OpenERP uses the contact that gets set up by filling out the Home Address (Human Resources > Employee > Personal Information page > Home Address section) to make payments to employees for expense reimbursements. When you fill out the Home Address contact page, DO NOT enter the company name in the company field if it is the same as your OpenERP company. Just leave the Company Name field blank. If you fill it in with your company, OpenERP basically thinks that the company is paying itself and decides to create an invoice owed to the company and not the individual employee. Therefore, no invoice items will show up when you try to make Supplier Payments for that employee.

You can see these details by going to the list of journal items (open an expense ticket, click Open Receipt, click the More drop-down at the top, and select Journal Items, and clear the filter in the search box). You will see that the Partner for these expenses shows the company and not the employee name.

To permanently solve the second problem, it would be nice if there was some kind of warning about this functionality (company "partner" overriding employee home contact "partner") in a pop-up context help or at the bottom of the Personal Information page for the Employee form. To solve the first problem, it would be nice if OpenERP would insert some helpful grey text like (user) after the names of OpenERP users to distinguish them from other contacts.

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Stein & Gabelgaard ApS

Re the first reason: I don't think you should have 2 "partners" pr Employee/User - Only 1.

When you create the user record, a partner record is created (user inherits partner) Use that partner as the Home Address of the Employee record.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to "promote" a partner to User, so the create sequence is important.