I have always used the actual balance link in the Bank and Cash Accounts tab to get the list of GL transactions for my bank reconciliations. However, recently I noticed that the actual balance was missing a few transactions and the total balance doesn’t match the summary screen or the bank summary report, which makes no sense.
Is this a bug or is there a reason that I am missing for the actual balance being different?
Dates for the Summary Screen?
@Tut & @Joe91, sorry for the delayed screenshots. Here they are:
Here’s the screenshot for the bank accounts from the summary screen
Here’s the screenshot of the transaction count for 2018 with the totals
Note that there’s 388 lines, which includes the starting balance, so in effect there’s 387 transactions.
Here’s the list of transactions after I go to actual balance of AED account and search for 2018/.
Note that the search includes matches from fields other than date, which means I’ll get results from other years as well. So, just to be extra sure, I filtered by Date and found 5 transactions from after 2018. Also, here’s the last page of the actual balance to confirm no transactions prior to 2018 are included
There’s a total of 391 transactions out of which 5 are after 2018. This leaves a total of 386 transactions which is one less than what I get from the summary screen.
There were 3 transactions before I reconciled the account. I turned out that these two transactions were cleared in 2019. So I guess the dates in Bank and Cash Accounts > Actual Balance are – in fact – cleared dates, so it would remove any confusion to label the field as “Cleared date” instead of just “Date”.
But that doesn’t solve the missing transaction mystery.
That’s right, the reconciliation do that by adding uncleared transactions to match bank statement balance,
Surely, you have more experience than I in using the Manager. However, when I have trouble reconciling a bank statement, I usually follow the usual procedure of creating matches at successive intervals until I find the period in which the discrepancy exists. Here you can create matches by months and count the transactions by number by month to ensure the appropriate period for the search, and then review the transactions in that period individually. This will definitely lead you to the transactions that caused the discrepancy. Isn’t that supposed?
I can quickly think of half a dozen possible explanations. But the only way to know is to find the source of the discrepancy. I would start at one end of the time period or the other and systematically alter dates until I identified the subset of 2018 where the count differs. Then make a transaction-by-transaction comparison. (There is also the possibility that some aspect of Manager’s automatic processes produces a count difference no matter what the period, possibly associated with opening balances or something similar.)
That’s pretty good advice, except it’s not related to my problem. 
As you can see my bank account is already reconciled and matching.
But my problem here wasn’t with reconciling books with statements, it’s with understanding how the bank and cash accounts tab works.
I think you’re right but it seems like the transaction in question has 0 amount, probably been voided so I can’t be bothered to search for it.
Now I am convinced that it was mostly my fault but it would’ve really helped if the column heading said Cleared Date instead of just Date. Is it possible to make that an idea?
The problem with your suggestion is that when drilling down on the Actual balance, the Date column’s content differs based on Pending/Cleared status. If the transaction is Pending, the listed date is the date of the transaction. If the status is Cleared, the clearance date shows. And, since entries could include both status options, Date is always correct.
No wonder I got confused. If the actual balance is the equivalent of a bank statement in Manager, wouldn’t it be more fitting to have cleared dates only? I don’t see any value in mixing together the two fields.
Edit: I understand now that pending transactions have no cleared date, but are they part of Actual Balance? or is that reserved for cleared transactions only?
This is the source of your misunderstanding. It is the cleared balance that is the equivalent of a bank statement. Remember, a bank statement, by definition, includes only cleared transactions.
Most definitely, yes. That is the definition of actual balance: cleared plus pending transactions, in other words, what the bank knows plus what you know but the bank does not.
