I would like to make a simple suggestion to make bank rules even more useful. I thought I might create a topic under “ideas” but apparently I am not allowed to do that. Is there another way?
This is the way, all topics first will be discussed here so just put the content of your suggestion here. If considered promoting to ideas the developer or moderators will put it there.
I changed the title of your topic and hope that you change the content of your message so it shows the details of your “suggestion to make bank rules even more useful”.
Thanks for the info.
The suggestion is: when displaying transactions with an associated bank rule, mark those that have more than one rule that applies.
Here follows a single use case where that would help. I am sure many others can be found.
I am treasurer of an amateur choir. Members are due a monthly fee, which they pay through bank transfer. Normally, no other payments from members are coming in and many members just transfer the money without mentioning that it is for membership in the description.
For each member, I have a balance account to keep track of their payments. There is a bank rule for every member that associates incoming money from that member with that account. All automatic and virtually no work involved. So far, so good.
Now, from time to time we hold a concert for which we sell tickets. Many members buy tickets for friends and family. This time, they will mention the word “ticket” and/or “concert” in the description. Also, many non-members do the same.
I have a rule that if one of these words is seen, the money will go to the concert account. This rule applies to all incoming payments with one of these words in the description, regardless where it is coming from.
Now for every payment from a member (which will thus have a rule attached) I have to look into the description to find out if it is a membership fee, or a ticket purchase. But if I would know that only a single rule applies on a payment from a member, it would be virtually certain that it is a membership fee payment (because that rule always applies to transfers from that member). Conversely, ticket payments from non-members would normally only have the ticket rule applicable. In both cases, attribution to the correct account would be automatic. Only when more than one rule applies I would have to go and look in the description to determine what to do.
This feature seems easy to implement and would make the use of bank rules in certain cases more efficient, without going to complex scenarios such as defining order of precedence of bank rules, adding support for logical combinations (and/or) of bank rules, etc., which would, I think, be an order of magnitude more complex both to implement and understand.
And if nothing else, a “multiple bank rules” flag would alert me that either something can be improved in my logic, or there is a real conflict that I need to resolve.
To be able to drill down to all bank rules that apply would be nice, but certainly not essential. Just mentioning the fact that there is more than one would be alert enough.