Problems with new bank transaction reference field

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  1. @lubos, the new automatic Reference field on bank transactions presents problems. The advice given previously was that this field was meant for a bank-assigned reference or transaction number. Those who used it that way could have a wide range of alphanumeric content already in the field on existing transactions.

    Manager will now pick up the highest number among those transactions and increment by 1, ignoring any alphabetic content. What is the purpose of numbering sequentially from what is, for all practical purposes, a random number? This is especially troublesome because those bank-assigned references can be quite long. Yet there is no way to reset, either to 1 or any other scheme, such as YYYYxxxx, when bank references already exist.

  2. For those who were not entering anything in the Reference field, another problem arises. Every time an existing transaction is opened, Manager will automatically apply a current sequence number, even though the transaction is old. This will present audit problems when current-period transactions are not sequentially numbered because a number was assigned to an old transaction.

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Oops, when did that happen? - I might stay with my current version 18.8.19 until this is resolved :slight_smile:

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So I guess the only option would be to downgrade the current Reference number into custom field and introduce new one which would automatically assign new reference numbers retrospectively?

I made it work that way in the latest version (18.8.32) so you can test and see what happens.

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18.8.34

All my reference numbers have been reset, starting at number 1. I can now no longer refer transactions back to my store (paypal reference number entered manually),

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The old reference number is a custom field which you can rename to PayPal reference and show it as a column. Can you check?

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Yes, that works. Will take a bit of getting used to.:wink:

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On the Receipts & Payments tab, the new Bank Reference custom field is displayed as a column - as expected, as the “Show custom field as a column” box is ticked in Settings / Custom Fields / Bank Transaction / Bank Reference

Would it be possible to show it as a column when you drill down to a bank statement balance using the Bank Account tab?