More than one year ago, Bank Accounts tab has been removed and merged into Cash Accounts tab. The main reason was that both tabs were behaving the same way and it felt the right thing to do at the time.
It seems like there is a major distinction between cash accounts and bank accounts which means they ought to be under their own tabs after all.
Terminology aside, we have “cash accounts” which are managed internally (petty cash, cash float etc.) and cash accounts which are managed by someone else (e.g. bank accounts, credit cards, bank loans, PayPal accounts, merchant accounts).
Depending whether accounts are managed internally or externally means you will use different workflow. For example, accounts managed internally (petty cash, cash float) will have transactions recorded manually, there won’t be outstanding deposits or pending withdrawals, there won’t be any importing of statements, bulk-categorization using bank rules nor reconciliation process.
On the other hand, externally-managed accounts (bank accounts, credit cards, bank loans, PayPal accounts, merchant accounts) will typically have all that. Statements will be imported, transactions will be bulk-categorized, reconciliation will be done, pending withdrawals and deposits will be tracked etc.
When both internally and externally managed cash accounts are in the single tab, it’s difficult to build an intuitive interface which will cater properly for both workflows at the same time. You might have noticed things are not ideal. Bank reconciliation has been tucked away under Reports tab, bank rules have been tucked away under Settings etc.
The latest version therefore re-introduces two tabs: Bank accounts & Cash accounts.
The naming of these tabs is not ideal (e.g PayPal is not a bank but it should be created as a bank account in Manager). However it’s the best terminology we have.
How to decide whether an account holding cash is bank or cash account? Use the simple rule:
If you manage an account by yourself, it’s a cash account. If it’s managed by someone else, it’s a bank account
This is because if the account is managed by someone else, you will probably not be recording transactions in Manager manually. You’d trigger transaction in external system (Internet banking app, PayPal website etc) and then download statement which you’d import into Manager, bulk-categorize, reconcile etc.
Therefore Bank Accounts tab will be built around the idea of importing statements while Cash Accounts tab will be built around the idea of manually recording them. It will be still possible to enter transactions manually into Bank Accounts tab or import into Cash Accounts tab but these options will be de-emphasized.
To wrap it all up. The reason behind having two tabs is because workflow is expected to be different in both.
Also, some users might find it nicer when bank accounts have their own special place in the program.
