New starting balance process issues

[Brucanna]

There are THREE issues with the new starting balance process.

1 - When entering a starting balance for the Expense Claims account it doesn’t get taken up when clicking “update”, yet a starting balance for the Payroll Liabilities account does.

Expense Claims V’s Payroll Liabilities
V’s

2 - Billable expenses has the exact same issue as Expense Claims. I suspect that both of these relate to the fact that both have sub-accounts but starting balances can’t be entered for those sub-accounts.

3 - There are two methods of entering a starting balance: via the Edit button or via clicking the blue balance figure.

When entering via the blue figure there is identifying naming displayed, when entering via the Edit button there is no identifying naming displayed.
V’s

[Tut]

I will add a few more issues:

• @Brucanna’s item #3 on lack of information in headers extends downwards in situations where you can drill down while setting starting balances. For example, in Fixed Assets, when you drill down on the Fixed assets account balance, then Edit a specific asset, you can enter the starting balances, but there is no indication which asset you are editing:

  

  This absence of header identification exists almost everywhere in the starting balances aspects of the program.

• In situations where you must drill down on the account balance to reach subsidiary ledgers, the order of presentation of those subsidiary ledgers seems random. For example, drilling down on Accounts receivable, the last customers on the resulting list are shown below:

  

  But these customers appear elsewhere in the list of customers. The only relevant factor I can see is that these customers, who show last in the list, have been the subject of fairly recent transactions. But entering a new transaction for a customer elsewhere in the list does not move them to the bottom. The listing is not alphabetical. Nor is it related to customer codes, which are not used in this test company.

  Similar randomness is encountered at least in Inventory on hand and Cash at bank. It may occur elsewhere, but I may not have enough entries in other tabs to see it.

• When entering starting balances for customer, suppliers, employees, and fixed assets (and probably other categories where you have to drill down for subsidiary ledgers), custom fields are showing on the input screen. For example:

  

  I suspect this happens because the program is showing a portion of a more comprehensive form; it has a start point, but not an end point.

[Joe91]

If you are using custom fields to record ongoing info eg no of days of holiday leave taken, you might be glad to see them in the opening balance settings form.

[Tut]

The problem is that they would be ignored. Custom fields are only informational. A user could easily be misled to believing that a starting balance for something like leave taken was being entered; then, they would stumble around trying to figure out why it was not affecting anything.

[lubos]

@Brucanna

When entering a starting balance for the Expense Claims account it doesn’t get taken up when clicking “update”, yet a starting balance for the Payroll Liabilities account does. Billable expenses has the exact same issue as Expense Claims. I suspect that both of these relate to the fact that both have sub-accounts but starting balances can’t be entered for those sub-accounts.

For accounts where setting up starting balances is not (yet) supported, they won’t show on Starting Balances screen now.

@Brucanna

There are two methods of entering a starting balance: via the Edit button or via clicking the blue balance figure.

Yeah, this is mostly because of consistency across the whole program. Clicking on the figure always means drilling-down into how that figure got calculated. Clicking on Edit button always shows the form. I didn’t want to break the consistency so I made it this way for now.

@Brucanna

When entering via the blue figure there is identifying naming displayed, when entering via the Edit button there is no identifying naming displayed.

This has been fixed now.

@Tut

@Brucanna’s item #3 on lack of information in headers extends downwards in situations where you can drill down while setting starting balances. For example, in Fixed Assets, when you drill down on the Fixed assets account balance, then Edit a specific asset, you can enter the starting balances, but there is no indication which asset you are editing:

This has been fixed. The asset name is shown prominently both on the form and in the breadcrumb trail now.

@Tut

In situations where you must drill down on the account balance to reach subsidiary ledgers, the order of presentation of those subsidiary ledgers seems random.

Also fixed. Sub-accounts will show in alphabetical order now.

@Tut

When entering starting balances for customer, suppliers, employees, and fixed assets (and probably other categories where you have to drill down for subsidiary ledgers), custom fields are showing on the input screen.

Fixed. Custom fields won’t show on starting balance forms.