Bank reconciliation slowing

Hello!

Wanted to share some issues\proposals I’ve encountered using Manager for some time:

I was using Manager for some time right now (approx 4-5 years). And started nonicing that “Bank reconciliation” summary page starting to load slowly and slowly.

For business we have many bank accounts and now we have more than 2k reconciliation entries.

My guess is that due to fact that on opening of “Bank reconciliation” tab manager “re-perform” all reconciliations (i.e. adding up payments/receipts and compare to number stored for that bank account for selected date).

May be it is feasible only to show, say last 5-10-15 reconciliations for each bank account?

I really like to “Bank reconciliation” function to keep track at which date balances were agreed to counterparty (bank in this case). As such I would like to propose to extend similar functionality\workflow for Customers/Suppliers and Special accounts (for loan movements, for example).

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

First, please limit your future “TED talks” to a single topic. No one interested in your second topic will read a post about slow bank reconciliations.

Second, you slightly misunderstand how the program works. The program does not “re-perform” reconciliations when you enter the Bank Reconciliations tab. A bank reconciliation is a process, not a result. The only things stored for a bank reconciliation are:

  • Date
  • Bank account UUID
  • Statement balance on that date
  • Transaction key

While 2000 reconciliations is a lot to store and display from the human perspective, it is trivial for a computer. The only time the program looks up anything else is when you View a particular reconciliation report, and that happens every time you view it, not when you open the tab.

You did not mention which edition you are using (desktop, server, or cloud). But if you are loading the tab via a network connection, the size of the list may slow things down, depending on your connection bandwidth.

The solution is to delete old reconciliations. If you ever need them again, you can recreate them whenever you want. Remember, the program has only stored the four parameters listed above (and it will reassign the last one).

Third, a bank reconciliation is not an agreement with any counterparty. It is only a verification that you have entered your records the same way the bank did. That is, your dates and amounts match, and your clearance status is correct.

Fourth, your suggestion to add reconciliations for customers/suppliers/special accounts really makes no sense, because you have no statements to reconcile against. And transactions with other parties do not have a Cleared/Pending status. A sales invoice, for example, is your own document. You cannot reconcile it with anything from the customer because you generated it yourself. There are already many ways in Manager to obtain transaction lists that can be checked for accuracy. But those would typically be verified against individual documents or sources of information. The exception might be a supplier sending you their customer statement, but you would compare that to a supplier statement in Manager. That process is distinctly different from a bank reconciliation. (For that matter, a bank reconciliation is really a redundant report that duplicates information also available elsewhere in the program. It was only added because so many consumers of Manager’s accounting information were wedded to old-fashioned, paper-based accounting reports.)

This is correct. The way how Bank Reconciliations tab is done is inefficient but I haven’t done anything about it for long time because nobody has complained until now. You need to accumulate a lot of bank reconciliations to make it noticeable. I’ll put this under ideas.

This has been proposed before and I do not have a problem with this idea but @Tut is correct that individual issues or feature requests need to be broken down into separate topics.

@lubos, are you saying that, just to display the list of previously created bank reconciliations, the program re-executes every single one? This would be different from every other report, where only the report definition is stored and the report is regenerated if/when viewed. If so, then I misled @zoomni, and I apologize for that and will edit my post.

Yes
The difference is the reconciliation tab shows a summary of every reconciliation. In contrast other tabs just show report definition information.

It’s easy enough to check. Just change an old entry. Reconciliations before that time will remain balanced but later reconciliations will be broken.

Imo this is a very valuable feature, so would be sad to loose it.

I’m not arguing for a change, @Patch. I just didn’t know it worked differently from other reports.

@zoomni please check in the latest version (22.3.6) where bank reconciliation tab should be faster now.

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