Pending/Cleared

Restricted users are able to see and edit the pending and cleared tabs in payments, receipts and inter account transfers. Is it supposed to be the case?

If they have access to the transaction, they can see every field. But there is no such thing as a pending or cleared tab, so your question is not clear.

@Tut you are right, i meant the field showing pending / Cleared. My thoughts on this are that the restricted users who are only aĺlowed to create and not edit or delete payments, receipts and inter account transfers should not be able to see the field. When this transaction is complete by this user, it should go to pending by default. After which it is cleared by some else with either rights up to edit or full access

In my opinion, locking accounting periods after reconciliation statements have been produced is the best way to handle the situation. This will stop changes from being made to the cleared field.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or not but the Lock Date is unable to prevent alterations to the cleared status of transactions. (In version 22.11.8.495)

Pending or cleared transaction does not affect the financial position of the business since only actual balances are used for financial reports. If a transaction is mistakenly cleared or changed from cleared status, it will always be revealed in a bank reconciliation.

I think by design, doing so was an idea.

1 Like

Definitely by design, not a bug.

The fault with your logic is that all levels of permission include View, and there is no breakdown of permissions by field.

Clearly, some users would want to lock the status field (with Lock Date) and others wouldn’t want that.

So I think the best solution now is to have the option to include the Clearing status in the Lock date.

image

If the second tick is checked, alterations will not be allowed for any field once the lock date is in place.

I would argue against the extra complexity. Previously, users complained about having to unlock their files just to clear a cheque, often after closing an accounting period. Since the modification more than a year ago, there has not been a single complaint about being able to clear transactions before the lock date.

Note that this topic is not even about that. Rather, it is about user permissions and the visibility of clearance status, not whether status should be editable. In other words, lock dates have nothing to do with this topic.

I’m actually the one who pushed for that into ideas.

Anyway, this field does not affect the financial position and nothing can be won or lost if restricted users are able to see and edit it.

If that is your viewpoint, why add the option?

For those who would want to lock it, remember it could bring discrepancies on bank reconciliation statements.

Thank you all. But idealy the genesis of this topic is from a situation where in the accounts department, i have two assistant accountants because of too many transaction happenings. One is for payables and the other is for receivables. Both the assistant accountants report to the company accountant and they both have no access to the bank account to see which receipts or payments or inter account transfers have cleared. The company accountant is the only one that have access to the bank account and the one doing bank reconciliations, hence the need for these two assistant accountant to only create transactions which would post to pending by default. This also allows the company accountant to monitor and check these payment when clearing them.

And i agree with @Tut, the topic is very far away from the lock date issue. Its about visibility of the pending/clearing to users only allowed up to ‘create’ of these three forms; payments, receipts and inter-account transfers. User permissions from ‘edit’ to ‘full access’ would see this field.

It seems like your workflow has the solution already built in. If the assistants are allowed to Create transactions, they will see all fields. Yes, they might incorrectly indicate a transaction is cleared when it is actually pending. But your chief accountant is already checking the transactions, or so you say. Any transaction the chief looks at that already shows as cleared will be a mistake. That is, after all, the purpose for supervisory reviews.

There certainly can be no harm from an assistant seeing the cleared/pending status field. You can easily prevent them from editing an existing transaction, so no danger occurs there. The only risk is that while creating a new transaction, an assistant might incorrectly show it as cleared. This risk can be partially mitigated using Form Defaults, leaving only the risk that an assistant will actively change a pending transaction to cleared during entry. And that will be discovered by the chief.

Thats what we are currently doing @Tut … however, many transactions require us to clone. In which case they always clone as cleared and these assistants won’t bother to change to pending… and these are so many transactions in the process. It’s quite hectic.

Restricting visibility of the clearance status won’t solve your problem, then. If the assistants clone or copy a transaction that is cleared—even if they cannot see the field—the clone or copy will also be cleared. The only difference is that they will be ignorant of their mistakes. But restricting their visibility will no nothing to prevent the mistake from occuring.