Bank reconciliation with missing interest expense

My bank does not include interest transactions for Credit Card or Line of Credit accounts and therefore these transactions need to be added manually after I import a bank statement in order to be able to reconcile these accounts. I wonder if you have given any thought to including interest as part of Reconciling. I am thinking of including an account, date and amount or even a warning that interest transactions may not exist in downloaded bank transactions and need to be added manually. The difference in the account balance when reconciling is, of course, due to the “missing transaction”. If this difference could be displayed one might realize this is interest and act accordingly. Any thoughts?

Is this an issue? When you are going through process of reconciling your bank balances in Manager, you are being asked for closing balances as per various dates. Based on the closing balances you enter, Manager will determine that on given day you are out of balance for specific amount and you will be asked to find and fix the difference (usually by entering new transaction that is missing in Manager and is visible on bank statement - this is the time you would enter your missing transaction).

Probably not a real issue but might be helpful, I don’t know. It’s a cart/horse thing. If interest is highlighted and entered it will reconcile. If not it will find it as you say. Just noticed how it was done in previously used software, interest being treated as a special case. Online accounts and balances have less information than statements. My MasterCredit card online account only has beginning and ending balances and the interest charge is not available online but can be calculated from the balances. Anyway, I will be reconciling later today with this in mind and will let you know if there is any perceived merit to any of this after thinking it through more carefully.

Legacy accounting systems are stuck in era when you do bank reconciliation once a month because that is how you receive bank statements. And you enter bank charges and interest right before bank reconciliation because until you receive your statement, you don’t know details of these transactions.

So that was one workflow that everybody was going by and that’s why you might feel like Manager is lacking because it is not optimized for this specific workflow.

But it cannot be optimized for this single workflow anymore. Since internet banking, there are now many more workflows how people might be entering (or importing), categorizing and reconciling their bank transactions and bank reconciliation in Manager must be the lowest common denominator of all these workflows.