Summary Page enhancement request

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I was very happy with the original Summary Page, but once the New Summary Page had sub accounts and control accounts implemented, I ended up being very pleased with the new summary page design as it took up a lot less space and showed all company information in one view with the ability to drill down and really works well.

However, I still believe that the the new summary page really does need a current, 30, 60 and 90 days overdue view for receipts and payments because this is information that companies really need to have on hand on the summary page as this is operational information.

All the other issues with the transition from old summary view to new summary view for myself has largely been resolved with the use of control accounts, sub accounts and groupings. The current, 30, 60 and 90 day overdue view is the only remaining missing element.

Would it be possible for the program to make accounts receivables and accounts payables as a control account with current, 30, 60 and 90 overdue underneath it - but like zero balances - only shows if there is a balance. That way we can see the total receivables and payables, yet still see on the summary page any overdues and drill down to those overdues.

I suspect that this can be quite easily done with minimal coding to Manager and I suspect will be quite simple to implement if coded to 30 days?

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A custom report or report transformation is probably a better way to implement this functionality as users will have different ideas on what are the critical time intervals or if late payments are that common at all in their business.

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3

Do these reports achieve most of the functionality you want?

  • Aged Receivables
  • Customer Statements (Unpaid Invoices)
  • Aged Payables
  • Supplier Statements (Unpaid Invoices)
4

I am generally with you on this subject, @Patch. Never have I seen a balance sheet broken down by aging. That would imply the aging groups are accounts. Of course, they are not. There are reasons behind the traditional arrangement of financial reports. We risk confusing and even alienating important consumers of those reports when we depart from standard practices.

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I agree with @Patch and @Tut that ageing should not be detailed in a balance sheet. What I would suggest is that, instead of the existing summary as the default/opening screen display, a dashboard, with a number of summary items, be the default/opening screen display with the ability to drill down on items in the dashboard to obtain the full details.

Dash board items could be Balance sheet summary showing Asset, liabilities and Equity totals. P&L showing Income, Expense and net profit totals. AP and AR ageing totals.

There could be a number of others that could be possibly included as well. e.g. working capital position.

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Well I have put out the suggestion because businesses (not accountants) actually use the aged payables information. This was on the original summary page and was one of the biggest losses of moving the old summary page to the new summary page. Most accounting programs seem to understand that this information is useful and necessary to see on the dashboard and even Lubos himself acknowledged in my original post several years ago that the situation with aged receivables was not optimal.

In my original post linked below on comparing the old and new summary page - many users had problems with the disappearance of the aged receivables/payables view from the summary page.

I don’t agree with using reports to do this as it is basically the equivalent of running a report to see what your bank balance is. This is something you want visible on the dashboard, not something you want to be constantly running reports on. I agree that most users will have different ideas of time intervals etc and that is where a report comes in if you want something different from the standard current, 30 days, 60 days and 90 days views that you often see in other accounting programs or the program could simply use the date of your invoice as the key factor to determine current or overdue! We don’t have to have 30, 60 and 90 etc.

The point of putting the aged payables on the summary page is because that is what Manager uses for the dashboard page which is where you want to see your operational information. As it’s extremely unlikely a new dashboard page will be implemented along the lines of AJD’s suggestion, I was hoping for a compromise by putting it back on the Summary page even though that section of the summary page is now the balance sheet.

I am actually happy to retain the current Summary Page as is because it provides all the information on all accounts and takes up less space than the old one did and I think a lot of accounting programs make the mistake of creating pretty graphs which look nice, but don’t really give you all that much information. All I want (and Lubos did acknowledge this point) is to be able to see the aged information on the summary page as this is the dashboard page and the dashboard page is where this information should be. The fact that the BS and P&L are now the default view on the dashboard page is irrelevant as the point of the dashboard page in accounting is to show the operational position of the business not the financial snapshot as was repeatedly said by many users in my original post.

What you forget is the summary page is not the balance sheet and profit and loss that the taxman sees and in fact I have customised my profit and loss and balance sheet view with headings that are more user friendly for me, but certainly not headings that you would ever see on a BS or P&L sent to the taxman. So the argument that it can’t go on the balance sheet on the summary page is irrelevant - all I am asking for is simply a breakdown of a total - that total can still be the COA in question. It would be merely a question of displaying the breakdown in a different colour from a COA to differentiate. Where there is a will, there is a way.

I hope that Lubos will consider putted aged payables/receivables back on the summary page as he himself did acknowledge that removing it was not optimal and I believe the summary page has been sufficiently developed with zero balances not showing, control accounts, drill down etc to enable this simple addition. We could even have a tick box to not show aged receivables/payables for those purist who would rather have the B/S strictly as a BS rather than putting on information that they could actually use to run their business. That way everyone wins!

The one thing that I find extremely frustrating about Manager forums is when users (myself and other people) ask for a feature that is virtually standard in every other accounting package only to be told why it can’t be done instead of recognising it as a valid request for anyone who actually runs a business. Cash flow management is critical for a business and aged receivables/payables is very relevant to this as is the ability to have a previous/next button to easily scroll through a selection of entries when you are trying to find something. The current design of having to open each transaction, exit it and then find the next transaction is really not optimal.

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7

In the server version of Manager you can book mark a report, such as aged receivables, in your web browser and so go straight to it.

User interface is a difficult thing to optimizes as everyone has a different use case and priories. Every user has different things they need to regularly watch or check. Screen real estate on each individuals desktop is very valuable, similar discussions occurred earlier on the forum with button placement / collapsible lists and colours.

In my personal use case I find the devil is in the detail so a screens dedicated to particular investigation is optimal for me. The current “Summary of accounts” providing me an excellent starting point to delve deeper into my businesses. Various reports for analysis other specific functions.

Aged receivables is a report I rarely have need to check. So while I have no objection to the facility being available it would be of no use to me. If such a facility was to be re-introduced, doing it in a manner such that it could be easily optimized to suit a broad spectrum of users preferences would be sensible. The balance then becomes between flexibility and difficulty to customize.

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Thank you @Patch for taking the time to respond to my latest comments as I probably came across a bit grumpy. It’s not really about the Summary Page but the fact that a vast number of requests over the years, some by me and many by other people always seem to meet considerable resistance to change.

For example the Previous, Next Buttons for scrolling through transactions - I am astonished at the resistance put up to a simple method of navigation that many other programs use (successfully I might add). The battle I had to put up to get my status of quotes and orders into the ideas category was unbelievable (considering that invoices have statuses) and even one of the users commenting on the issue said he couldn’t understand why there was such resistance to implementing a simple filter to make it easier to handle a sales funnel. I have come to the conclusion that the problem is some people are accountants and other people are business owners and their use of the software is very different as result.

Yes I could probably do a workaround in the Server version. But this misses the point. The question is not should aged receivables go on the balance sheet which is where I think you and Tut are looking at the question from. Yes you are technically right - it is not a BS field. But that’s not the question I am asking.

The question is should aged receivables go on the Dashboard page (which just happens to be the BS and P&L view). My opinion (backed up a number of other people in my original post and no doubt elsewhere on the forum) - is that yes - the aged receivables etc does need to be on the Dashboard. The whole point of a dashboard page (as far as accounting is concerned) is to show the operational status of a business and overdue invoices as per cash flow is a actually quite a big part of this operational view.

The key things the majority of business wants on hand is bank balance, cash balances, receivables (with aged), payables (with aged) as well as VAT returns values. We have all this with the sole exception of aged transactions. All of the above constitute the operational status view.

What Lubos did is he removed the operational view (which businesses use daily) and replaced it with a financial snapshot which is generally more relevant for quarterly and annually usage and mainly for accountants. He fixed a lot of the issues relating to this change as many people (myself included) complained that viewing bank balances, receivables and payables suddenly was a lot harder - it was still there, but not as visible as before and these were the main things people want to look at each day. Because he addressed most of these issues, we don’t need to go back to the old summary page.

I happen to agree with you @Patch in that I prefer the new summary view because it now contains all the information of the business whilst taking up less space and I like the ability to drill down. So yes - I fully agree with you that the new summary page works better (now that all the original problems with the transition are resolved). I don’t want to go back to the old view, I simply want to improve the current view with functionality that was lost and was actually used by many people. What Lubos did was make it possible for us to customise the view of the summary page to make things like bank balances and other items of operational interest stand out better. All I want is to somehow add the aged receivables back to the operational view where it used to be.

I appreciate that you may not use this, but I suspect as far as businesses go, you are probably in the minority on this as most businesses value having that view. I don’t use it a lot, but I still argue that it is something that should be as visible as viewing your bank balance on the summary page. I am sure that Lubos would be happy to include a button to enable/disable showing aged receivables/payments for those people who don’t want to see that on the summary page.

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9

I’m with @dalacor on this one. Bring back the A/R to the summary page please.

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@sparky Thank you for the support. :+1:

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And it could be located in the real estate under the Tabs listing, with the option to display or not via the Summary tab Edit button just like the 0 Exclude Zero Bal

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Yes that is exactly where I was thinking of putting the optional A/R view button - right next to the zero balances button. Oh well I will see if one day it gets implemented.