Hi lubos, nice to hear your thoughts on this but I have a couple of notes.
I don’t know where you got this idea but that’s not true. Most if not all other accounting software can debit and credit any other account and that’s not unique to Manager. Some can even create a simple payment or receipt against other bank account thereby skipping transfers altogether.
Why do they still use matching then?
Reading your post, I feel that you have missed the point. You are discussing import and ignoring other more important aspects to maintaining bank accounts.
As much as love manager but I have to admit that it’s banking capabilities could use some improvements to be neck and neck with competition.
To learn why, we need to discuss what is bank reconciliation. Bank reconciliation boils down to these two steps:
- Identifying discrepancies between book (internal set of records) and bank records (external set of records)
- Resolving discrepancies
Here’s the areas where Manager is currently lacking:
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Manager can’t identify discrepancies. Sure the current bank reconciliation shows the total discrepancies for the closing balance, but I cannot do anything with it because Manager fails to attribute them to single transactions. How would I resolve them? Externally is the only available solution right now.
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Manager does nothing to prevent deletions of reconciled transactions.
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Manager doesn’t keep a decent audit trail over bank reconciliation process, mainly because there isn’t a bank reconciliation process, the bank reconciliation tab just creates superficial reports with nothing underneath.
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Manager can’t accommodate both manual and imported bank transactions. It just duplicates them and never gives you a clue what went wrong or where.
Take this for example, I wrongly set a transaction to be cleared when in fact it hasn’t. Or I set a transaction recorded at 100 BHD to cleared when it appeared in the bank at 105 BHD. Can Manager point this out to me? No.
For that you suggested this:
But how? Manager will never point out the faulty entries. This this must mean that I will have to go through each and every single transaction manually all while keeping a bank statement in a spreadsheet or PDF open. Even more likely I will have to do this 
That’s what my nightmares are made of.
When in other software, you’ll have the system point the discrepancies to you and you can only undo a few matches to correct the entire thing without going to a spreadsheet or a PDF.
I know that many-to-many matching might not be feasible and that’s why I thought of simple referencing to an external record on a 1-to-1 basis. Just like referencing an invoice in a receipt.
Let’s go back full circle to this point.
… while
I think you misunderstood the matching or referencing concept.
In my suggestion as well as in other software, the bank statement do not have GL entries. They are not part of the transaction, they’re just additional documents. Think of it like it’s adding an attachment but in a more dynamic context.
The receipt/payment/transfer will still be a 100% self contained with all of it’s lines intact. It will only be referenced in a line in the bank statement.