I am using the Mac version 22.1.4. I have entered the opening bank balance and imported my bank statement for the first month. It seems the reconciliation process does not consider the opening balance a cleared balance and statement is unreconciled due to the difference between the opening balance and he cleared balance. How can I set the opening balance to cleared?
Reconciliations are very difficult to troubleshoot remotely, because we cannot see any of the information displayed by the program to you. To begin, please post a screen shot of the Edit screen on which you defined the bank account. (Obscure any account identifiers for privacy.)
As you can see the discrepancy is the exact difference between the opening statement balance and the new statement balance.
Now drill down on your statement balances in the Bank and Cash Accounts tab (both cleared and actual). Are all your entered transactions cleared? Or are they still pending?
It is also worth asking if you followed the reconciliation process all the way through to its completion. That should have guided you toward the solution to your problem.
The only cleared balance is the opening balance. Everything else is in pending. On entering the Jan 31 balance it comes up with an unreconciled difference as shown. There is simply no entry that can account for the size of the difference. When I click on "view’ it simply lists all of the pending transactions up to Jan 31 and a big red NOT RECONCILED at the bottom. I do not see an opening reconciled statement amount on the reconciliation report view but I would not know if it is supposed to show that (I would the thought so). As I pointed out, the difference is exactly equal to the opening balance less the cleared balance at Jan 31 - i.e.1,056,548.36 – 455,565.14 = 600,983.22 which is the discrepancy.
Where? There are View buttons throughout the program. And you did not answer my question on whether you followed the reconciliation process to conclusion.
Once I clicked on the difference of the reconciliation and went through each entry, editing it to cleared with the appropriate date, it reconciled. The manual implies upon entering the closing balance the system would have auto-reconciled, or have I missed something? Otherwise seems to be a very tedious process.
What you call auto-reconciliation only occurs when everything is perfectly coordinated and in agreement. Since you imported your statement, that provided additional potential points of difference. Yes, the process is tedious, but so was hand reconciliation with a manual check register back in the day.
It’s not possible to know exactly what interfered with successful reconciliation. Nor is it possible to illustrate every possible outcome in the Guide, because the program adapts to the entries actually present and shows different things under different circumstances.
I am curious. You still did not indicate whether you followed the reconciliation process to completion or only edited the transactions independently.
That’s unusual.
Bank import normally sets each imported transaction as cleared as part of Manager’s bank import process.
I followed the reconciliation process. Once they were all cleared I still had a difference of 6,200 which was a missing transaction. The question I have is why did it not just bring up that difference in the first instance instead of my having to explicitly clear each transaction? That is what caused the confusion, if it had simply come up with a 6,200 difference in the first instance this entire conversation would not have happened.
“Since you imported your statement…”. I did not import, entries were done manually as they occurred over the month. Reading between the lines it appears importation may be a useful part of the process. I had expected a process similar to Xero where the statement is imported, compared to existing, differences highlighted and completed. It is not clear from the documentation that bank importation could be part of the reconciliation process, it appears to be a feature that assists in the data entry of bank accounts with large volumes. Regardless I hope this exchange will assist anyone else with a similar set of circumstances going forward. I do have another account to reconcile with a small number of transactions and I will ensure everything is in agreement before I do the first reconcile & we will see if the behavior differs. I will revert in due course.
OK so I reconciled the other account. As there was a cheque issued but not yet cleared, the behavior was the same, I had to manually clear all of the entries to get it to reconcile. Obviously importing the bank statement in this instance would have been a non-event as the uncleared cheque would not have been on it. So it appears that the reconciliation process may fail to operate as expected on the first instance after conversion. We’ll see how it behaves at the end of this month.
Although the guide indicates By default, all new receipts and payments to bank accounts in the Receipts and Payments tabs are Cleared, this is not true as the default status is Pending. @lubos I guess this is a bug?
@JGF until the above is changed, you can set the default to Cleared by changing this option in both Receipt and Payment under Settings > Form defaults.
Well, in your first post, you wrote:
Yes I did, my error. Sorry I meant to say I had entered the balance into the reconciliation. At the point in time I considered bank import as a process of the conversion. I have a clearer understanding now. Regardless it does appear to be a bug in the system the way it is behaving.
Mark thanks for input. The system does set “cleared” as the default & I changed it to pending. It appears that the process in this system is better approached from the opposite way than traditionally done. Traditionally, all items are pending until explicitly reconciled. In this system the more efficient approach appears to be to set everything as cleared on entry and change those uncleared to pending at reconciliation. Unless it behaves differently on the second reconciliation and clears the entries automatically. We’ll see. I do agree it appears to be a bug given the behavior.
@JGF, your last post is confusing. You say, “The system does set ‘cleared’ as the default & I changed it to pending.” Why would that be a bug?
That’s not the definition Manager uses.
A cheque is pending when it has been written.
It is cleared when the external bank has cleared it and the funds are available (or not available for payments) to the Manager businesses.
Tut you misunderstood my post. That reply was to Mark who commented to Lubos that the reconciliation issue I was experiencing is a bug and I was agreeing with him on that point. It was not related to whether an entry is pending or cleared.