I posted in another subject the need to see if changing mm/dd/yyyy to dd/mm/yyyy through a batch update would help solve the problem that we suffer from inversed dates. The support and provided code (excel) were cool. Now that we used this formula, updated the entries, it appears that it mixes things up badly. So then as trial we decidd to create a test business and only import one statement that had lots of confusing dates (November 2020). After importing the CSV and allocating it to accounts it appeared that there was no problem with the original imported statement.
So now we are at a loss, why do some dates even below the 12/12/year randomly for any given month seem to either use mm//dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy while we set the date and numbers in settings to the dd/mm/yyyy and when it was still global to dd/mm/yyyy. We have more than 10,000 entries from bank statements in receipts and payments through bank imports now and are extremely worried because of this issue as some dates are for later this year.
Any support is not only urgently needed but very appreciated as well. The whole system and all we put there is now a waste of effort. We think that Manager changes, related to dates functions are related to this. Please check your own receipts and payment dates and see if they match. In our case, they sometimes match but often don’t. It seems random and for all years except 2021 so it may relate to the change from global date to settings date & number.
Indeed a desperate message as we fear ti have to go back years and start from scratch re-importing each bank statement, assign bank rules, and update.
We only import bank statements. We decided to test one of the CVS files that we imported, in this case November 2020 where some, but not all, of the 1-12 days are reversed to mm/dd/yyyy rather than dd/mm/yyyy (13 - 30 days not affected as always correct) and noticed that this test import has no errors. We did not carry out bank reconciliations (new company that started March 2019, in our jurisdiction grace period of 18 months, but we extended because of Covid and still have to conclude and submit (indeed now overdue and imminent).
The issue here is how can these dates for these imports get muddled up almost randomly and not for every month and only for some of the 1 to 12 days of that month and not all, while with a test import of one of them in v 21.4.56 (Server Ubuntu) this is not happening. The only thing we can think of is that something happened with some dates as part of change from global date definition (which was dd/mm/yyyy) to the new date & numbers definition in settings, especially as 2021 has not been affected but many (not all) of the other months and only few days in each. Hence posting to this forum and seeking the support.
Internally Manager is storing dates as numbers, not as text. So changing date format would never change already entered transactions. And no dates would be changed retrospectively as a result of any upgrade.
This is really a case of importing bank statements and not noticing dates being imported with wrong date because bank reconciliation was not done monthly.
import a backup of your business and rename as test business
redo the bank import with the correct date format
transaction with the same (correct) date should be skipped
sort by transaction description. Should show mostly pairs of transactions, new import with the correct date, old with correct account allocation. So copy date to old transaction then delete new bank import transaction.
I can confirm that Manager works correctly only if you set 000 000.00 and YYYY/MM/DD and you import this format. Other formats will end up with strange beaviors.
@Patch, I trialled with the November 2020 statement (account statements stated September 2018), which we also used originally. It imported 164 out of the 633 items, so these have their dates affected. We corrected some of these in the way you described but for quite a number, especially the bank VAT charges this is difficult as they have no unique identifier or description throughout the bank statement and across all bank statements so will be difficult to identify which are right and which are wrong and this which should be amended and which should be deleted. We also fear that this is going to take a long time if this is from September 2018 to January 2021 which is about 27 months assuming and average of 150 is 4,050 entries to correct. We did not see errors for 2021 which seems to coincide with the change of date and number into the settings. I will later today try to install an older desktop version (would like to know which version still had the global date format for this) and import an older backup that will read in that version to verify if this indeed is caused by the later Manager versions or through some other action. As noted before we are puzzled by this because we imported exactly the same bank statement for the second time and it obviously behaves different, ie correctly the second time.
Thank you! Seems nothing left to do than plough through the more than possible 4,000 wrong entries and repeat the steps you suggested… sigh. Also good advice to change to amount.
I just installed v 20.10.94 for macOS (Catalina) which is the last version with global preferences. Modified the date to dd/mm/yyyy and imported a backup from 14 December 2020. There are no messed up dates anymore. Strangely the Bank Stamp Duty dates in the description on original statements by the Bank (so bank error nothing to do with Manager) for some months in 2020 use mm/dd/yyyy but the entry dates are now correct.
So as kind of suspected the change from global to settings->date & number from v 20.10.95 onwards has messed up the earlier dates in the account.
UPDATE: Importing this older backup into v21.4.64 also shows all as expected. I then also test imported a new bank statement for January 2021 and all are as expected. So I can only conclude, which I did not test, that for example one of the versions shortly after v20.10.94 did something really wrong with messing up the data.
Although, still some work but not as bad as revising thousands of entries is to start importing Bnk Statements in this back-up from 14 December 2020 ill date, and re-enter any other actions such as Journal entries, invoices, purchase orders, inventory and non-inventory items as well (will explore batch update for those). So unfortunate and should have caught this around that time so could have alerted for bug. I hope that others are not affected as we are by this.
The mess up of dates start to appear in backups between 10 and 16 March which relates to Manager versions between v21.3.0 and v21.3.50 both Desktop macOS Catalina and Ubuntu Server. We mainly use Server and backups are always made from server edition.
As mentioned before the mess up affects all dates from the beginning. Versions and backups until March work fine. I should also note that there was a backlog in bank statement imports. The January 2021 statement was imported after the 10 March backup. Hoever, I just re-imported that statement but using server v21.4.64 and no problem with that either. So somehow the root of the issue is with a Manager version between v21.3.0 and v21.3.50. I am now trying to drill down from history in the 16 March backup when the switch actually will have taken place and will report here.
UPDATE: On 10/03/2021, 11:22:33 there is a Batch Update that changes a lot of dates but it can not be “undone” whatever I try. I guess that even though it says Administrator that did the update I am sure I didn’t but most likely will have updated Manager to a new version on that day at that time. There were 3 version updates v21.3.38, v21.3.39 and v21.3.40 . Somehow one of these triggered that batch update and messed up all the dates. It is also strange that I can not undo this batch update. I think that @Lubos may have the answer to this.
@eko, if it shows in history then it was action made by user. Feel free to take your backup and upgrade to any of those versions and you will see no batch update changing your dates will be triggered.
As for why you can’t undo. Do you get any error? What actually happens when you click undo button?
Yes, we were having trouble with bath update changing the dates to random dates, and changing the settings to use the format you suggested worked as fix. So there is something wrong in the code, but at least now we continue to update the system.
I remember the times when we didn’t have any problems in that regard, but the developer seems to suffer the same issues as the rest of us what with the different platforms and servers.
The best method, at least for me, was to switch to ISO date (yyyy-MM-dd) or a similar format. This format should be available in any region (in theory at least)
I use that format for both my PC and Manager and never had any real problems ever since.
As at that screenshot above…the date(02/09/2021 and 03/09/2021) is right as seen from production orders tab…but then when I drill down from inventory items---->quantity on hand…the dates shown are of the same day(03/09/2021) which is wrong…and when a client sees that, they may think the production took place on the same day as seen from the screenshot below which is not true
