Don't like new Balance Sheet Drill down

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I updated a few days ago to the latest version. Working on my accounts tonight, I discovered that it was listing all the inventory on hand for the last four years including zero balances.

I found this post - Summary Accounts payable drilldown now showing zero balances and I see that @lubos has updated the program again to show transactions with amounts first then zero balances.

So I have updated again to at least have the open transactions listed first.

I don’t like this new change because it’s now too much information clutter. All I want when clicking on Inventory on hand - is to well see the inventory on hand - that is by definition the equipment that I have bought but not yet sold.

The same with accounts payable. All I want to see is the suppliers that I owe money to, not the whole bloody lot of suppliers that I have. Same with accounts receivable. I don’t want to see every client. I just want to see who owes me money!

I can go to customers or suppliers to see any information I want to see about them. Why do I need this in accounts payable or accounts receivable and why do I need to see all the inventory on hand that I have ever received.

I have looked at the extra information provided in the summary page drilldown and I will concede that the information is presented more elegantly in the summary page drill down compared to what I see when I go to inventory tab or suppliers or customers, however, the vast majority of time when people are clicking on Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable or Inventory on Hand, people are just interested in the outstanding amounts.

Could I suggest that all zero balances transactions be accessed by another click within the drill down. What I mean, is let’s say you have four suppliers to pay. So when you click on accounts payable it shows the four suppliers you owe money to and there is a fifth row that could be called expand all transactions and when you click on that it shows everything as you it shows now.

This would achieve both aims. Provides this new information when people want to do indepth analysis but also allows ensures that if you just want to see outstanding balances, there is no clutter of information which just makes it seem crowded. I liked the old format where I could just see the amounts I owed, amounts owed to me and for inventory items it was easy to see what inventory items I needed to invoice.

Now there is just too much information which I don’t need 99% of the time (people just want the outstanding balances most of the time). Can you please implement the change that I suggested @lubos as it will have the advantages of both worlds, with none of the disadvantages. Thank you.

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Zero is a number and most of the time that zero balance has equal debit to it credit in the transaction history for which other users like me often want to read.
The app must show all accounts balances whether zero or negetive or positive. An accountant wants to know. I’m loving this new feature

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Let’s get to the basics.

When you view balance sheet and click on account balance, you expect to see list of all transactions which made up the account balance. This is actually how it has been for long time in Manager. It was only since last year that for control accounts, we group all transactions by sub-account.

When I implemented grouping by sub-account, I made it so sub-accounts with zero balances are not shown. This means all transactions which belong to zero-balance sub-accounts are basically inaccessible by drilling-down. I think we all agree that transactions shouldn’t disappear from drilling-down mechanism just because they belonged to sub-account which happened to have zero balance. So I corrected this issue.

Now, I recognize that you are usually interested in sub-accounts which hold non-zero balances. For this reason, the current sorting mechanism shows these sub-accounts first.

What else can we do? Perhaps in Balance column we could show little - (dash) instead of 0.00. This would make sub-accounts with balances stand out even more.

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What I would suggest is an expand option. Show just the open balances and underneath people can click on expand to see all historical transactions.

I understand why you made the change and I will be the first to admit that the information provided is more elegantly displayed than could be found elsewhere in the program and upon further review, I would like to keep this change.

Couldn’t we combine both features by having an expand option to view historical transactions (zero balance amounts). This way we have the best of both worlds.

I think this would solve the issue for everyone by providing the non zero balance information which is what most people are wanting 95% of the time, and for the 5% of the time, when you do actually want to drill down for more information, just click expand to show the hidden rows of historical transactions?

Sometimes too much information is counter-productive. Let’s make the information available when people actually want to drill down in depth rather than having it in your face permanently when all you want to see is maybe 5 transactions.

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@lubos - Any thoughts on my solution as posted above?

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Why bother? If subaccounts with open balances are shown first, and the rest are zero, clicking on a button to expand is an unnecessary complication.

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As Lubos recognised, to make the amounts with balances stand out better.

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Actually @lubos, I may have a better suggestion than my original suggestion of expanding.

What about status columuns like you have on the invoices tab. I know it’s the balance sheet, not a tab.

The reason why I am thinking of this even though its the balance sheet and not a tab is because status columns do make it easier to see the open balances, but not only could this concept be applied for Accounts Payable/Receivable and Inventory On hand, but I can see a use for things like Vat Tax Payable where it could make it easier to view open vat transactions. Something that my accountant mentioned wasn’t that easy to do. You have to run a report which shouldn’t be necessary.

Same with corporation tax payable, accruals, DLA etc. Almost like Reconciliation which you have in place for the bank account? I kind of like the logic of making open balances more viewable on the BS as things like VAT Tax payable, the main thing you are really interested in is open balances so you can see how you arrived at the figure you owe the taxman.

This obviously is only for Balance Sheet Items and may not even apply to all BS items, so I appreciate may not actually work upon further investigation. But I think making open balances more easy to view on the BS is worth considering as most of the time people are interested in the open transactions rather than historical.