Feedback: custom columns / search / import export

1

Hi! I am an old user of Manager, looking to move back after a few years in Quickbooks. I need to migrate a bunch of data, so just thought I’d post regarding some usability ideas I have come across after quickly playing around. I love Manager, but it is so flexible and configurable that when I can’t do something I am actually surprised! Most of this is aimed directly to @lubos, apologies if this is the wrong channel for this kind of thing.

  1. Custom Columns throughout
    The ability to enable / disable columns on all tabs would be helpful. Eg on Receipts & Payments or Bank Accounts / Uncategorized transactions it would help to see what Tax code is selected on transactions. This is apparently in the works, so just adding my vote.

  2. Search Context
    Search is not very intuitive, since there is no description of what you can or can’t search. For example on the Receipts and Transactions tab I can search by date, but in Find and recode I cannot. I understand after reading the documentation that Find and recode is tailored towards searching Account names, but this is confusing UI.

  3. Filtering
    Alongside search a proper query builder / filtering system would be amazing. From forum posts I believe this is coming also.

  4. Batch Update from Search
    When searching eg Receipts & Payments, if you select Batch Update the breadcrumbs place Batch Update after your search query like so: Receipts & Payments ‘12/3/2018’ / Batch Update. This leads you to think that when you copy data to clipboard it will only include the searched results for updating, however it includes the entire dataset. The breadcrumbs shouldn’t include the search query in this context, or better yet you should be able to batch update from search results.

  5. No DB Keys
    I know it is coming, but natural language rather than keys in export/import data is a must. When migrating large amounts of data I cannot even comprehend finding and replacing names with keys without doing it programmatically, and even still the time involved is prohibitive and keys are something humans should never have to deal with. I know titles aren’t primary keys so there can be a duplicates, perhaps a temporary solution would be: If not duplicate use natural language; if duplicate keep as suspense / add to special account / flag as needing attention / add middle stage of import to correct errors

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Re #5, if anyone is interested I just wrote a little Google Apps script that lets you automatically search a Google spreadsheet and replace a list of defined Names with Keys given the following conditions:

Sheet 1 name = Legend (all the Names and Keys you would like to swap) in 2 cols
Sheet 2 name = Protected (list of Columns you would like to ignore, eg Line.Description)
Sheet 3 name = Data (the Sheet to search and replace)

Given that manager batch editing and import works via copy paste currently, once things are set up in a single google spreadsheed (ie. you have defined all your Keys and Names, figured out columns that need to be skipped) this makes swapping keys and names really easy. This could also be useful in reverse, i.e. export data, replace all Keys with natural language Names, then swap back before reimporting.

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  1. Yeah, this will be implemented.
  2. Find & Recode screen will require uplifting at some point. It’s possible that at some point batch operations get so good, Find & Recode will become redundant and could be removed altogether.
  3. Isn’t this what Custom Reports are (or going to be) about?
  4. I agree with this. Currently batch operations don’t take into account context you are looking at but this will be improved.
  5. Also, this is going to be improved so you don’t have to work with hexadecimal keys.
1 Like
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Thanks for the reponse.

Re #3 I guess the workflow I am thinking of links #3 and #4, eg. filter Payments between x and y dates greater than x dollars with “ATM” in description → batch update.

However If you can batch update from Reports then that solves it.

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I see, this makes sense to implement once #1 is done.

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I am however starting to understand the power of import export, with spreadsheet filters I can achieve what I am after and it becomes really powerful.

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Batch Update on records from searchresult (nr 4 in list) and/or filtered records (nr 3 in list) for example in Receipts & Payments tab would be a great feature. Although filtering can be done in Excel as @mikieinglis points out, it is just not as efficient to have to move all records to Excel just to Batch Update a few.

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Just bumping this, I would still love to see Batch Update from filtered Receipts & Payments.

A solid rationale is use-cases like where Find & Recode doesn’t work, eg I can’t select my Owner’s Equity account in Find & Recode for whatever reason.