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.