Bank imports and transfers

[Ealfardan]

I think I have an idea on how to improve reconciliation / import procedures without compromising Manager’s simplicity.

For those who completely rely on bank imports they will have 1 additional click of a button since upload and import will be split into two but it’s nothing compared to the advantages they will also receive in bank reconciliation/import improvements.

Quick summary for those who can’t be bothered to read the entire post

• Bank Reconciliation tab will change to Bank Statement tab
• Bank rules will be unified again and will include Transfers as well
• Cleared on / Cleared date will be dropped. Instead, each transaction will be referenced in a line of the new Bank Statement edit form
• Uploads of bank statements will be exclusively from Bank Statements tab
• Users will be allowed to manually match transactions before importing or just skip the matching and import the entire thing
• Users will be able to chose not to see the detailed matching process if their statements and books are matching, or in case they’re having trouble they can examine the new transparent matching inner workings and fix their errors completely within manager itself
• Automatic matching of uploading bank statements will continue as-is with old import process
• Automatic matching of manual transactions can wait if and when the developer decides it’s feasible

Details for those who are interested

The new bank rules are as follows:

These will shared by receipts, payments and transfers.

The new Bank Statements tab that will replace Bank Reconciliations:

The first option is to upload a bank statement which will:

• Ask the user to upload file
• Create a new bank statement in the “Bank Statements” tab with the lines imported and take you the View screen, which shouldn’t be any different from what we currently have in “Bank Reconciliations”.
• No receipts, payments or transfers are created so far.

The top action buttons for the View screen of bank statement should include the following buttons/menus:

• Edit
• Clone (just to accommodate manual bank statement entries with no lines, so that users who relied on the previous method can still do it the old way)
• Import Unmatched Entries. This will continue the old import, application of bank rules and categorization process only this time, the import will exclude whatever has been matched by the user and the import will take into consideration the transaction types that the user selected in the Edit form which is as follows:

Note the following:

• The lines and all their fields will not show on printed documents, so that we still get the old neat view mode similar to the old Bank Reconciliations.
• the bank statement (previously bank reco’) entry form includes two dates: a Start date and an End date. This is because it contains the bank statement and not just the ending balance. This will be prefilled if the bank statements has been uploaded.
• the bank statement now includes two balances: a Starting balance and an Ending balance to ensure that: (1) users can reconcile the old way without uploading anything – this is especially important in case the user has only scanned statements; and (2) to allow the users to make manual changes like splitting a bank line in case the bank grouped some entries – in my country some banks would group their own cheques under one entry for the day (e.g. Deposit Home CHQs) so the user cannot match this to multiple transaction so the user can manually split the entry himself by adding a new line and subtracting that from the original line.
• There’s a balance check at the end similar to what we have in Journal Entries in order to accommodate for users’ manual adjustments.
• The user can select the type of transaction of each line. For positive lines the user can choose either (receipt or transfer) and for negative lines the user can choose either (payment or transfer). These choices will be taken into consideration in importing of unmatched transactions.
• Upon choosing the transaction type, a dropdown list will appear that include the pending bank transactions of that type for that particular bank account.
• Once a specific transaction has been referenced, the Import Unmatched Entries will ignore that line.

This should keep track of everything except unequal matches. For that there should be additional status column in the Receipts, Payments and Transfer tabs to show the matched/cleared status. like so

For receipts and payments the statuses will be:

• Cleared for perfectly matched transactions
• Partial match for transactions matched with bank entries of different amounts
• Pending
• Blank for cash transactions.

For transfers an additional status of “partially cleared” status for transfers cleared in a single account but not both. Alternatively, there could be two statuses for Transfers.

If possible, the matching discrepancies can be shown in the status as well similar to how overdue invoices are displayed.

And the benefits are …

I stand to be corrected but although I don’t think this is exactly what @peterb had in mind but it checks many of the boxes for him without:

• Compromising the simplicity of Manager
• Bending backwards to have manager do relational database stuff (you know manager is an object or document database and trying to make it mimic what it isn’t might hinder its performance)
• Affecting the workflows of users who will not benefit from the additions. In case of those who only rely on imports, the will upload as usual and that would take them to bank statement view screen and only then they can click on Import Unmatched Entries which is only one click away. For users who don’t import but still reconcile, you don’t need to import, just post the closing balance and you’re good to go if the figures are matching.
• This method will ensure backwards compatibility since all the fields of the previous Bank Reconciliation document map to Bank Statements. In fact, they’re still there.

Also, this will enable the user to do both manual and imports and also improve the transparency and audit trail over bank reconciliations and import as myself, @Patch, @Davide among other users who would appreciate such improvements.

Finally, an additional benefit that would come as a freebie is that if you try to delete a matched transaction, you will be prompted with this little lovely message:

And then you can press Edit and remove the reference first before deleting it. In case the user has no business in bank reconciliation (and no access as a result) then this will prevent an idiot from ruining a perfectly reconciled bank account.