I am a new user, and congratulations on developing this software. My setup is all receipts are on my website processed by PayPal, so the activity statement from PayPal is my bridge across to Manager.
The issue is that my dd/mm/yyyy format date is changed to mm/dd/yyyy in the import, despite having set the Manager date format to dd/mm/yyyy. I know this has been discussed before about imports.
Because I have to run some VBA on my export file anyway, I used VBA to alter the date format to in my csv file to yyyy-mm-dd, because that is country independent, and it imported perfectly.
My purpose in posting this is 1) to report that the date format is being changed in the import, and 2) to report the workaround I found, which I’ve not seen elsewhere in this forum.
I’ve not posted screenshots because what I’m describing is obvious enough. I’ve triple checked my date format setting in Manager, and also checked my csv dates in a text editor, to ensure they were truly dd/mm/yyyy, without quotes.
As an aside, I love the way you’ve structured your import so that receipts are unallocated, therefore able to be separated from existing receipts, rules applied, so that only those not caught by the rules are easily seen and able to be handled. It took me a while to see the flow, but it is very clean!
Here is a screenshot of the relevant part of the heading and first data line of my PayPal activity report that I’m importing. Transaction ID + Name get imported into description. The date displayed here is what I have altered the date to, in order for it to work. The original date was 22/01/2025.
I only downloaded the software yesterday from manager.io, and it installed version 25.2.4.2064. I just checked and the version from the website now is 25.2.7.2071, to which I’ve updated. I do not understand how that could happen, but it did.
Attempting to run the import again now has produced a variety of outcomes, possibly because of future dates (my receipt data is up-to-date to today, so past dates show as duplicates). I will wait a couple of days and experiment with the import again.
We used to face issues with date formats until Manager made ISO dates available for all imports.
I see you have set your dates to the ISO format, which is the smart thing to do since this US-EU date issue is so pervasive not only in Manager but everywhere else.
As I indicated, my receipt data was up-to-date to 7 Feb 2025, so any legitimate receipt date was identified as a duplicate and therefore not processed. If I put a future date in:
Formatted as 08/02/2025, it reported as the import file corrupted and not able to import.
Formatted as 2025-02-08, not reported as corrupted, but in the receipt list the receipt was marked in red with a marker, I presume to indicate that it is dated in the future.
So a future date is reported as a corruption in the dd/mm/yyyy format, but is accepted but indicated in the receipt list as future in the yyyy-mm-dd format. I don’t imagine that difference in behaviour is intentional. It is not important to me, because I would never be posting real data with future dates, but it is just an observation I’m passing on.
But as to my issue of the date format dd/mm/yyyy being imported as mm/dd/yyyy, that is resolved. However, as indicated earlier, since I have to pre-process anyway, I will continue to convert to yyyy-mm-dd because it is unambiguous and therefore simply a better standard (thanks, Ealfardan).
Is the version derived from the date and the final part a rolling counter of version changes? If so, 7 updates occurring since my initial download is indeed quick rolling out of updates. I see only significant changes make it to the release list on the releases page on the website.
Wow from me: Because of the repetitive nature of my sales, and all receipt data coming across from reports from PayPal, a combination of imports and bank rules has meant I could bring my new Manager accounts up to current, fully balanced against PayPal and Bank, in a few hours. This is after about a day of testing, learning and refining my process. That is incredible efficiency! My monthly update will now take about 10 minutes, where in my old software it took about 2 hours each time. Thank you lubos and your team
Sorry, it isn’t changing the date, but that misunderstanding is my fault…
When I first did tried the future date, 2025-02-08 was future, because here it was then 2025-02-07. When I re-did the test this morning and took screenshots I used 2025-02-09, because now it is 2025-02-08. It did not change the date.
The only issue I’m highlighting is that if there are dd/mm/yyyy formatted future dates in the import file, it reports the import file as corrupt, but if dates in the import file are yyyy-mm-dd the import file is accepted if it contains future dates. I only mention the “future” mark in the receipt list because clearly future dates are anticipated as a possibility, hence the “corrupted” verdict is unintentional.
It’s not a big deal, because future dated receipts is a weird thing. But as a lifelong programmer, I appreciate it when people tell me that my software is doing something inconsistent, so I like to return the favour.
