Are you saying that if uncleared deposits and unpresented cheques facilities are used that they will remain in the uncleared deposits and unpresented cheques accounts and will only be “cleared” by some manual reconciliation procedure similar to ticking? What will happen to downloaded bank deposits or cheques from a bank import? These will be duplicate transactions won’t they? Will these duplicates also be handled by this manual ticking procedure at reconciliation time too? Are we going to have to reconcile a bank account to get rid of duplicate deposits and cheques? I hope you can see a way to automate this. I don’t want to see lists that require any ticking thanks. I guess this may be necessary for people who don`t use online banking and you have only addressed their concerns in your comments.
@esenicki, your observation is not quite correct. For example, all my banking is online. All my checks are sent that way; I never physically write one. In fact, if the bank can identify the payee and their account, no check is really generated. Instead, an electronic deposit is made.
I think your comment is directed to the fact that you import your statement and generate your transactions in Manager that way. Using the import function to create transactions is really the important distinguishing characteristic.
@esenicki, importing bank statements won’t create duplicates. Even if you have uncleared transactions.
The reason is that uncleared transactions don’t actually debit or credit actual bank account. They just sit in their own control accounts like invoices.
When you are categorizing your imported bank statement lines and the bank statement line represents a deposit, you will simply allocate the payment to Uncleared deposits account. It’s no different from allocating the bank statement line to any other expense account or control accounts such as Accounts receivable.
To make it even more automated, I’m separately working on Bank rules module which will allow you set the rules which will automatically categorize your imported bank transactions.
In your case, you will actually never see bank reconciliation screen since your balance as per bank statement should always equal to your balance in Statement balance column. And you will never encounter anything which would reassemble “ticking” process as long as you import your bank statements properly.
Excellent! Thank you Lubos!
I updated to .71 and am now a bit confused. I entered a receive money and it did go to uncleared deposits but when I entered a spend money it still hit the bank directly (there was no way to choose a ‘payment method’). I checked the bank account set up and the ‘cheque facility’ selection option is gone. I think I see where you are going, i.e. all manually entered receipts run through uncleared deposits then either get reconciled (ticked off) or matched to imported bank statement lines… am I interpreting that direction correctly? Is your intent the same with payments, i.e. everything goes through uncleared payments or are you still thinking about adding a ‘payment method’ selection option to spend money screen. Anyway, it seems right now as of .71 I cannot record a cheque payment to uncleared payments…
Can’t reproduce this issue. If I click on the figure under Uncleared payments column, I can record uncleared payment. I doesn’t affect statement balance at all.
Not all manually entered bank transaction. You can still manually create bank transaction under Statement balance column but only do that if the transaction is actually on your bank statement on that day.
Any deposit or payment which will appear on bank statement at later date must be recorded under Uncleared deposits or Uncleared payments column.
Once it appears on your bank statement (whether by importing or manually entering transaction), you can clear the uncleared amount by allocating the transaction to Uncleared deposits or Uncleared payments account.
There will be some shortcuts if you don’t import bank statement at all, you will be able to easily “clear” uncleared transactions with a click of a button.
Yup you’re right, I must have not have clicked on the uncleared before entering it. Both say spend money or receive money when you click so requires paying attention.
Couple of questions"
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Still didn’t seem to be able to pick a cash account when making a deposit in order to take monies from petty cash and deposit to bank;
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From Purchase Invoice screen and Sales Invoice screens how do I direct cheques written (spend money) or receipts recorded to the uncleared accounts rather than direct to the bank?
Thanks.
Since we are still waiting for the improved reconciliation process, I decided to experiment by clearing one transaction each from Uncleared Deposits and Uncleared Payments. For the first, I used Receive Money after selecting the Statement Balance and allocated to Uncleared Deposits. For the second, I used Spend Money, also under Statement Balance, and allocated to Uncleared Payments.
The deposit cleared perfectly. But the payment ended up in Suspense. I’ve verified the transaction twice and even deleted and re-entered it with the same result. The payment is still listed in Uncleared Payments, but the Spend Money transaction reduced the bank account. So the Actual Balance showing is too low.
This seems like the opposite problem @alasdair thought he had (though I believe it turned out he didn’t).
I have received a post dated cheque for 500K and wanted to take it to Uncleared Deposits. I have done that through Bank Accounts Tab and recorded it. However, I do not find the amount reflecting on the summary under Other Assets - Uncleared Deposit. Please comment…
Both images are here for better understanding…
I believe your problem may be with dates. If you entered the post-dated check with its actual written date, it won’t show up on today’s Summary. That would be correct, because it isn’t yet an asset, since you can’t present it. I suspect that if you entered it with today’s date it would show. You might experiment to see if that is true.
Bank Accounts tab will always show totals for all transactions (including future transactions).
Summary tab can show figures for all transactions too but usually you have it set to some date range which means post-dated cheque might not show.
The question is whether post-dated cheque should be recorded as post-dated. You see, if your customer sent you a cheque (even if it’s post-dated), do you want to see their sales invoice still unpaid? I don’t think so.
I would enter all post-dated cheques with the date when they were actually received.
I was wondering if “uncleared bank deposits” actually works yet for my situation described above or is it still in a “temporary state”.
Thinking that maybe I have missed something in the development of the software since my original comments on Apr 9, I tried to create a series of “deposits” for individual customers under the uncleared deposits column and then I imported (downloaded) bank transactions that contained a “single” deposit transaction for these customers (they don’t match but the totals are the same).
What I got was a bank deposit transaction that was categorized as Suspense. The Statement Balance matches the bank statement. If I now follow the guide instructions and “go to edit uncleared deposit and set status as Cleared”, I get all these uncleared deposits now adding into the Statement Balance column increasing the balance due to essentially duplication of deposits.
This is of course nonsense. I don’t see any way yet to remove this duplication without deleting one or the other of these deposits which puts me back to where I started. ie. just enter multiple customer deposits directly into the Statement Balance column with the correct present or future date matching the bank date so that Manager doesn’t duplicate them.
Bank rules doesn’t appear as yet to have changed to accommodate anything with respect to uncleared/cleared bank transactions.
Reconciliation process doesn’t do anything either as far as I can see unless it is to delete duplicates created by this new process. I don’t yet see how this can be automated either in its current state to make it “actually less work and more correct”.
Please advise Lubos.
If you are importing bank transactions and have any uncleared deposits, you simply need to “clear” those uncleared deposits before importing. This way when you import bank statement, Manager will skip those cleared transactions.
What I’m thinking is that if you have any uncleared transactions, during bank statement import, Manager can ask you which uncleared transactions have cleared already right before import as to avoid duplicates. Thoughts?
Sorry, but you still seem to not understand our problem. Our deposits are made up of multiple cheques and/or cash in a single transaction because this is what the bank treats any deposit of this kind. It is not reasonable to make a deposit individually for every cheque or cash customer payment.
So, in order to record customer payments in Manager, as currently implemented, is to use the Receive Money button and add as many lines as necessary to create a single Manager bank transaction which will match the single imported bank transaction from the bank.
The problem with this is that all customer payments recorded in Manager will have the date of the deposit and not the actual payment date which affects customer statements. We currently record the payment details (including payment date) under the description field.
Since the addition of this “uncleared deposits” feature, we have an additional step of having to “clear” a bank transaction every time we create a deposit. If we don’t, we will have a duplicate bank transaction as you have suggested and your solution of now having Manager “ask” if we have any uncleared transactions and presumably click on something to “clear” them will just add ANOTHER step to the process that we don’t need.
However, what we do need is the ability to record customer payment dates on an individual basis. It is not the uncleared deposits feature itself that we are complaining about. It is simply that it does not fulfill our needs as currently implemented. I know it is “more correct” to use this feature and if you could automate it (as I think you promised earlier) that would be ok. Or if we could “turn off” this feature for now, it would eliminate having to remember to do it every time we create a deposit to avoid duplicate transactions in Manager.
If we had a field on each line of our deposit for a customer payment date (the deposit date is at the top), and Manager could record this date instead of the deposit date for customer payment statements, then this would work for us.
Any thoughts?
We could also use the “uncleared Deposits” feature and record individual customer payments one-by-one which would record the correct payment dates for each payment, but we would need some way to combine these into a single deposit to match the imported bank deposit transaction in the “clearing” process.
Currently, clearing is applied individually not in groups of payments that make up a deposit. If this were possible and we could also have a printout to take to the bank showing and totaling the combined deposit to compare with what the bank actually deposits, that would work. We can get a list now by using the Search facility and input a date to get a printout and sum for the deposit from the uncleared deposit list.
Automating the deposit process as much as possible would be welcome.