The program is not properly remembering Last reconciliation date for bank accounts. The displayed date frequently reverts to Never for accounts that have previously been reconciled. I cannot determine the conditions that cause this problem. It may be related to transaction clearance dates later than the most recent successful reconciliation. Or it may be related to discrepancies in the daily balance caused by the order of transaction processing.
Whether Manager correctly interprets running balances when several transactions occur on a single day or not, it should remember the date of the last reconciliation.
When you click on Never link, it will give you list of reconciliation dates and status for each date. If none of them show status as reconciled, then bank account has “never” been reconciled.
Perhaps bank reconciliation should serve a function where once the bank account is reconciled, you can lock the bank account prior reconciliation date therefore reconciliation cannot be un-done by creating or updating historical transactions.
This doesn’t make sense. Often, when Manager presents dates/balances and lists account transactions because the movements are different, the dates involved are neither the last reconciliation date nor the current date, but some more restricted time span. So it just isn’t true that the account has never been reconciled. Why even bother to test the two date limits on the time period in question? The chances of the account having been reconciled on either one are low. So you will usually get a wrong, Never indication.
That seems like unnecessary work. I don’t know what is stored now that reconciliation statements are no longer reports. But when they were, you could store as many reports as you wanted. I suspect something similar is still stored, because you can call up the bank-reconciliation-statement-view as long as the date doesn’t list Never. So why not just rely on the most recent statement’s date as Last reconciliation?
This isn’t a good illustration because there isn’t actually a bank statement for this synthetic account, and many transactions have been entered only to provide illustrations in response to forum questions. So if I click View, I’m in the middle of a reconciliation process I can’t complete.
I will try to construct a complete illustration, but I may not be able to, because I don’t understand what triggers the problem.
Well, this bank account has not been reconciled. Just because you create bank reconciliation, it doesn’t mean the bank account is reconciled.
The main issue with bank reconciliations is that people still don’t reconcile their bank accounts. I’m open to new ideas which will nudge people in that direction but right now I don’t consider this to be a bug.
You can’t have bank accounts tab claim that last reconciliation was on 04/18/2017 when the bank account was clearly not reconciled for that date.
In this case, perhaps. But in my real business, I reconcile all bank accounts regularly. I noticed this problem because I reconciled an account–complete with a balanced reconciliation statement–on October 10. On October 12, because I had entered quite a few transactions and cleared several deposits and withdrawals that were pending, I went to reconcile again. The program said the account had never been reconciled, and that is just plain wrong. When I clicked on Never, the reconciliation statement was there and could be viewed. I edited the date to October 12. Then, when I viewed it again, the program ran me through a Q&A session. Something that has always confused me about the reconciliation process is that the program says balances have been entered on various dates, but account balances are never entered. They are computed from transaction entries. So it has never been logical to me to edit balances without editing transactions.
I have just encountered the same error and I have reconciled every month.
I thought it was strange but clicked on ‘never’ and went on from there but it was done in the end.
Thought it was something I had done, but apparently a bug introduced since the 1st of September, the last time I reconciled. I was using 17.10.20 desktop.
Can you demonstrate with screenshots? What do you see when you click on Never link? I think this is a misunderstanding of implementation (which is subject for another discussion) rather than a bug.
I think @VACUUMDOG will have the same difficulty I am having. Once you perservere through the reconciliation process, there is nothing to illustrate the problem. And you cannot go back to recreate it. Without knowing what causes this, you cannot even synthesize a fake example. I think all we can do is watch for the next time the situation arises and start capturing screen shots then.
@Tut is right. It first showed reconciled 30/8/17 and there was a problem with the balance when I went to do it… I checked the transactions and went back to reconcile. Then the ‘Never’ showed up. I clicked on the ‘Never’ then went through the process of entering figures and it was OK.
Just to jump in and add my own experience - I can’t say I’ve ever noticed this, and I’ve been reconciling regularly every 1-2 weeks for the past two months. Before then I wasn’t using the reconcile feature.
Sometimes creating a new incoming payment will make one of the more recent reconciliations no longer reconciled, but that makes perfect sense to me, and I can work through the reconciliation again for that date. But even then, it doesn’t show “Never”.
I’m happy to try reproducing this on my end too, if anyone finds a potential cause.
It is overcome by clicking on ‘Never’ and going trough the process, at least for me it did.
I am aware of it now so if it happens again I will grab screen shots.
It happened again, so I can illustrate with screen shots. A bank account was previously reconciled on October 12:
A withdrawal transaction was entered as Pending on October 16. The reconciliation report was edited for date to October 16. It then, of course, showed status as Not reconciled:
But the Bank Accounts tab shows that account as never having been reconciled:
I don’t know what would have happened if I had created a new reconciliation report for October 16 rather than editing the October 12 report. I understand the account had never been reconciled as of October 16, but it is misleading and confusing to see status listed as Never when, in fact, the account had been reconciled 4 days earlier. The solution may lie in not allowing reconciliation reports to be edited.
It is very difficult to experiment with this, because it seems that once an account has been reconciled, it remains reconciled as of that date even if all the transactions since any previous reconciliation and the reconciliation statement itself are deleted.
when you are editing the only available reconciliation report, it goes back to not reconciled state. this is true as a general logic and Manager reports what it has to report, the account has never been reconciled because you only have one reconciliation entry which is not reconciled.
i think it is a best practice to make new bank reconciliation every time because if there is a mismatch i will know after what particular date i am having a mismatch problem.
Why edit? My understanding is that we should be doing exactly this:
Before:
10/12/2017 = Reconciled
After:
10/12/2017 = Reconciled
10/16/2016 = Not Reconciled
^ If it looks like that (because you create a new one on 16th October), it should not show “Never” but will instead show 12th October as the last date reconciliation was done.
Your explanation would make sense, @ShaneAU, if that is the way the program actually behaved. I was actually experimenting with another account to continue my comments, however, and saw that it did not. But by then it was too late to capture the process in screen shots. So that was the origin of my comment about how it is very difficult to experiment on this subject. But what I saw was a report on the current date that was not reconciled as shown on the reconciliation statement list, yet the BankAccounts tab listed the current date as the last reconciliation. So the problem is actually worse than I originally thought and I’m further from understanding it.
Hmm, interesting. I’ve only noticed the program behaving in the way that sharpdrivetek and I indicated. As in, that has been the way the program behaves in my experience. Clearly you’re seeing something very different.
I’ll try to do some more testing and see if I can break things.
