Hello
a. When I create transactions that are ‘pending’, I had an expectation that they would be linked to transactions allocated to ‘suspense’ after importing downloaded statements, or recognised as pre-existing transactions, and changed to ‘cleared’ automatically.
b. It also appears that multiple line transactions are also not recognised following importation and bank rules not applied.
Kind regards
a. None of your expectations was correct. Transactions go to the Suspense account when incomplete or incorrect. See Clear transactions in Suspense account | Manager. Those in Suspense during the bank importation process are there because they are incomplete and were not recognized by an existing bank rule for automatic posting to specific accounts. By definition, any transaction in an import is cleared, not pending.
b. Not true. The bank sees only the total withdrawal or deposit, not line items. So the bank has no knowledge about line items making up a transaction, but it still knows about any cleared withdrawal or deposit and reports it on the statement as one transaction, which is how it appears to the bank. When designing bank rules, you must recognize this fact. So you cannot design bank rules that allocate specific line items (which don’t exist in the bank statement) to various accounts. You can only design rules that allocate the one line of the statement.
Thanks, Tut
I understand the limitation of adding multiple transaction lines and Manager not being able to marry them to imported transactions.
‘ By definition, any transaction in an import is cleared, not pending.’,
which is why I thought Manager should be able to convert a pending transaction to cleared when a matching transaction is imported.
Otherwise, it is only during the reconciliation process, pending transactions are listed, allowing them to be cleared at this time.
The program cannot do this, because you should not be doing this. You either enter transactions manually or you import them, but not both. Doing both means they will have been entered twice. If you are going to import after manual entry, you need to delete the manual entries. But there is little purpose to doing that. If you were willing to enter them manually first, you should just convert them to Cleared status and skip the import.
Note the first sentence in this Guide: https://www.manager.io/guides/9240:
To save time, you can import bank statement transactions instead of manually entering them.
The key word is instead.