GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 593897
Customer listing/editing
Last modified: 2018-06-29 22:28:01 UTC
It would be very useful to have a specific "Customer Control" area e.g. 1. Easy listing of existing customers, ability to delete obsolete entries (needs protection e.g. are there any invoices etc. associated before deleting, ensure they are inactive before deleting). 2. Adding of new customers (useful for initial or block setting up of customers). 3. Possibly making a snail mail-out option and e-mail mail-out option of some description available - e.g. to advise changes like address of business, telephone number, offers, etc.
Thank you for your report. Part of what you ask has been implemented now in the development branch of GnuCash which will eventually be released as 2.6.x. 1. The easy listing is there, but you can't delete obsolete entries just yet. The initial code for that is there, but it results in a crash. So this still has to be debugged. 2. Adding new customers from the customer overview is easy: there's a toolbar button for that. 3. Mail out (snail/e-) is not implemented. This would require considerable additional effort, because there is no basic infrastructure available for such activities currently.
Just a note to say that the GDPR may make it necessary to have a facility to delete customers because of "the right to be forgotten" inbuilt into the new regulations. How to do this AND retain past data for the taxman is a dilemma that needs resolving. The home page is https://www.eugdpr.org/
(In reply to Mike Evans from comment #2) > Just a note to say that the GDPR may make it necessary to have a facility to > delete customers because of "the right to be forgotten" inbuilt into the new > regulations. How to do this AND retain past data for the taxman is a > dilemma that needs resolving. > > The home page is https://www.eugdpr.org/ A cursory review seems to indicate that governmental functions (public interest) aren't to be impeded by the regulation. But the specific clauses that refer to 'legitimate government functions' seem to only be with respect to EU members. I don't see anything yet on such functions or 'public interest' outside the EU. (such as the case of a U.S. business having invoice data on an EU customer and the IRS demanding records that said EU customer wanted deleted under their 'right to be forgotten'.) The regulation also seems to indicate that the data doesn't have to be deleted as long as it's still being used for the initial purpose. Proper business accounting, or compliance with a local jurisdiction might constitute such 'initial purposes.' Without getting into a discussion on the merits of the regulation, especially with respect to non-EU businesses, possibly this can be solved by psuedonymization. I could see how it would be a nice feature to select a customer, click a button, and have all relevant personal info substituted with some defaults like 'Customer A', '123 Any Street', et cetera, but certainly any user can do this manually now.
A short discussion on the mailing list seem to indicate that user data held for contractual purposes are exempt under Article 6(1)(b) so not really a problem for GnuCash users. Probably. Although GDPR does apply to traders outside of the EU if they have customers within the EU. Bur as I say Article 6(1)(b) appears to cover them too. See: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/contract/
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