A few steps to improve the bank import/reconciliation process

Idea suggested by Kevin Doran 10 years ago

Seeing as all of us probably use the bank import/rec tool on a regular basis, i'd like to highlight the following areas I think would improve the user experience:

  1. When being presented with a list of invoices/bills to allocate a receipt/payment against, listing the ‘reference’ would be helpful. See this post. Done

  2. When allocating a statement line against an open invoice/bill, once the allocate button has been pressed the screen should refocus at the bottom of the page to save having to scroll all the way back down before being able to press the ‘add transaction' button. Done

  3. Before pressing the ‘add transaction’ button you’re presented with the text: Receipt/Payment of £X will be allocated as followed. After the £X it would be helpful to see a copy of the text from the statement line itself. In progress - Will be resolved by moving the explain area to under the transaction being explained

  4. Once the ‘add transaction’ or ‘reconcile’ buttons have been pressed, the refocus should be on the next unexplained statement line as opposed to the top of the statement. Done

  5. ‘Filter explained’ should stay that way once a statement line is reconciled against an invoice/bill that’s already been paid. See this post. Done.

  6. Consider making allocation a one click process (toggle feature) See this post. Done

  7. Create a 'matching' feature (for want of a better word) to avoid having to delete statement lines (example: for transfers between accounts where it’s already been explained via the account it left, explaining it again via the account it was received onto would create a duplicate therefore a deletion is required. I’d rather ‘match’ the transfers against each other to save deletion/duplication. Another example would be payments/receipts that cover more than one invoice/bill.) This will be part of the bank import overhaul - too big task with the current design

  8. Deleted transactions shouldn't disappear completely and should come with the option to be reinstated if needed. (screenshot example to follow - won't let me upload at the mo). Done.

  9. When creating a look-up rule, once assigning the rule to an entity it should automatically pick up the account/VAT/project via the details entered within the customer/supplier details screen to avoid having to duplicate. See this post. Rejected - see justification below.

  10. Have the ability to merge numerous imported unexplained statements into one. This will be part of the bank import overhaul - too big task with the current design - this is a seemingly simple task, but there can be conflicts with other improvements - such as auto-explain on import.

  11. Accountant/client unexplained transaction area (a method to deal with query transactions) See this post. The new design will allow you to see all unexplained transactions at bank account level (so not for a particular statement). I have noted the request to export these, and the request to add notes per transactions.

  12. Improve the invoices suggestions for the allocation process. This is a momentous task algorithmically - if there are 100 unallocated invoices, to find a pair that tally would require nearly 5000 comparisons. We will be researching this soon, but if we can improve most likely this will happen with the new design.

  13. Stop the page from refreshing. The new design is based on what is technically known as single-view (AJAX), there will be no page refreshes with the new design

  14. Show reverse running total when only partly explaining a transaction. Rejected - unclear what is being requested.

  15. Clearly be able to see the line transaction when explaining it. In progress - will be resolved by moving the explain area to under the transaction being explained

  16. Move to the next page after explaining the last transaction on the current page. Done

  17. Scroll to the transaction being explained (with long statements). Done

  18. Hitting 'Mass update' on any page should not send the user back to page 1. Done.

  19. Automatically apply auto-explain rules upon import. Part of the new design, looking into a way to integrate to current design

  20. When choosing an entity - mark those who owe money (say in red) and those who are owed to (say in green) - this will help picking the right entity. Accepted

  21. When pressing Reconcile, the page shouldn't reset to page 1. Done.

Whilst the likes of point 11 are likely to be a bigger job than some (but something I think all accountants at least would benefit from not to mention their clients) i'd presume quite a few of the others would be easier to implement and would really help speed up the process.

Kev

107 Replies

Hi Kevin,

thanks for your post, it's great to see so much detail as it make it so much clearer for us to know what you would like to see. Of course, there are many items here and some will be easier and quicker to do than others. It will be good to see just what other users think about these ideas and which they would most like to see too.

Thanks

Chris

Cheers Roey, even the smallest of tweaks will make us all smile i'm sure :-)

Hi Kevin,

I'm currently processing this list and hopefully we can start pushing fixes, one by one, in weeks to follow.

We scheduled improvements to the bank import / explain pages to start on 2 Jan 2015.

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Hi Kevin,

Isn't 6 the proper solution for 2?

We already have 6 in our backlog and hopefully it will be picked up in the next 2 working weeks. So I guess by implementing 6, there's no need for 2?

If you're going to implement 6 as standard instead of a toggle feature then yes. If toggle, then 2 would still be required of course.

I personally don't mind the extra click required in step 6 (many will disagree i'm sure), it's a decent fail-safe to avoid misallocating. Step 2 is a timesink at present though.

Hi Kevin,

As for 2... On my computer it does scroll down to the bottom of the page after hitting allocate.

Which browser/version do you use?

Chrome but just tried it using IE too.

That particular point has been mentioned by quite a few users. You're not confusing the initial click on the transaction (which does indeed take the focus down to the bottom) with the allocate click? Make sure you're using a big ish statement too of course.

Yeah, I know quite a few complained about it. I'm sure it's not working for some - just failing to recreate it here. I guess I'll keep trying!

Don't think the link's working....

Yep. Saw the video via dropbox. Much as I try, can't reproduce this issue here - tried IE9 and IE11; Chrome on Mac/PC. No one else seems to be able to reproduce it either.

I'll get in touch via private channels to try and get more info.

Thanks!

2 has been fixed.

There will be some edge cases where the 'Add transaction' button will be slightly below the bottom of the screen (aka 'the fold'), but to solve these will require some changes to the page design.

We had a limited capacity to test the solution as we can just about reproduce it. So as always - your feedback is welcomed!

Just tried it on a couple of transactions, works a dream!

Although small you should stick it in the news section as i'd have thought a few will be happy to see this working.

And a quick note about 7:

One of the current solutions proposed is that when you import a statement, the system will automatically lookup for such 'redundant' transactions (eg, two bank accounts, two statements, transaction explained in one account, but a duplicate still exists on the other). When the system finds one, it will mark it as 'redundant' - you will still see the transaction if you wish (there will be a way to hide redundant transactions), but clicking on it will tell you 'This transaction is redundant to transaction XYZ'.

We could, for starters, just add a manual way to mark a transaction as 'redundant'.

This links to another proposal - when you delete transactions from a statement, they aren't 'hard deleted' (removed forever) but 'soft deleted' (marked as deleted) - which means the user can choose to show/hide deleted transactions. The idea behind it is that you have a mean to see the full transaction as imported. It could also be useful as you could 'undelete'.

Deleted covers point 8 then :-)

Re point 7: how will the system search for these transactions? Will the text have to match perfectly?

No.

The system will look for a transaction that was explained as transfer from another account that has the same day and (negative) amount.

I don't know if true for all statements (we still have to do research on this), but on some statements transfer description have the format:

TO/FROM 123456

Where 123456 is the bank account number.

So if one provides a bank account number for their bank account and there's TO/FROM in the description - it's pretty much job done.

This type of matching rule will be internal to begin with. Advance match query might be rolled to users as well (something like the advance search feature google has) - but we didn't quite researched the needs/use-cases of this.

as a short-term fix for 10 and 11, how about a "hide explained items" filter/button. This sounds simple, but don't know whether that is quick to implement

Ah, I think the current behaviour is actually to go back to the other unexplained items on that page because I think that's what has just happened to me?

Re: 4:

"Once the ‘add transaction’ or ‘reconcile’ buttons have been pressed, the refocus should be on the next unexplained statement line as opposed to the top of the statement."

I'm not sure I understand what 'refocus' means. Do you mean that the next unexplained transaction should appear at the very top of the browser window?

Re: 3

Well, based on the new design the explain section should really appear below the transaction you explain. Here's a quick and dirty mock up I did for this:

file

Now I'm pretty sure we can change the current design to work this way - it might be a relatively easy task.

What are your views on this?

Hi Roey

Posting from my mobile...

On the face of it 3 looks good, anything to make things easier and more obvious (which that would seem to do).

Re 4 - I'll check once I'm home later.

This looks great to me, and also looks like it'll solve the truncation problem.

Point 12

As a further development to point 6, I think the allocation of a payment can be painful at times when there are numerous invoices from a supplier. Is there any way to make the software 'guess' the allocation ? The obvious way is to apply to the oldest invoices first until the money runs out. But a later refinement would be, if the previous method does not work exactly, to see if the software could find a set of invoices that did work out (but this may then have to include payments on account and credit notes - bet I'm scaring you now). Anything to improve allocation would be good, as that is definitely a weak area at the moment.

Point 13

Going back to the allocation thing, part of the current problem is having to refresh the screen each time an invoice is selected. If you can't do a really good fix, at least let us have some sort of select feature (like using the control button in windows), so we only have to refresh once rather than every invoice.

Point 14

And a reverse running total to show how much is left to allocate could be useful if possible and not made redundant by other improvements.

Point 15

Can we remove the unnecessary truncation of the statement's description line?

file

This means that, for instance, I would have to scroll up my list to see what the whole statement line looked like, so I can match it to a client, let alone to an invoice or billing reference.

Point 16

Here's another one. You get to the bottom of, say, your 10 statements on page 6, and when you explain the last one, it just refreshes the page and sits there. You then have to click on the very small page number or > arrow to go to the next page of statement, whereas I think it should just go to the next unexplained line, and not interrupt your workflow.

Point 17

@Roey

Re 4 - example would be a statement of say 100 transactions, where i've already explained say 90 of them. I click on line 91, reconcile it then instead of the screen next focusing on line 92 i.e. the next unexplained transaction, it reverts back to line 1 resulting in a manual scroll back down to 92.

This will be rectified by your proposed solution for item 3 though so probably no need to give it much thought.

I have edited the original post to include other points brought up here and a few more that arrived via other channels. I've also included a status update on each.

@Martin

"how about a "hide explained items" filter/button."

This already exists, but is about to change slightly, so the second point in this weekly:

(The actual label will be 'Hide explained')

file

A minor improvement: You can now click the whole row to select a transaction to explain (previously you had to click on the text).

We are also aware that the currently it's hard to tell which transaction is highlighted - this will be fixed by tomorrow.

Points 5 and 18 are done.

1 & 5 work great!!

21 Is done as well - but 4 is still pending, so pressing reconcile may not refocus on the next transaction. 4 is being worked on and should fix this.

I have a supplier that I use a lot each month. At the end of each month, I end up with lots of payments to this supplier that have to be reconciled against their invoices that I have put on the system. Clearbooks gives me a whole list and I have to look carefully to allocated the correct payment against the right invoice. It would be helpful if it would highlight the exact matches rather than giving me the whole lot...

I make mistakes. I click things and regret it. Unfortunately Clearbooks does not seem to have an UNDO option most of the time. Sure, I can work around stuff but an undo facility (especially when reconciling imported bank statements, would be great.

Nice to see point 6 working Roey. Bit scary at first but is a real time saver once you get used to it.

How far away are we from the explain section appearing directly below the transaction being explained? It's not at all clear at present so there's plenty of scrolling back up involved.

@Richard - yes, everything you mention is known.

As for better suggestions - we are looking into how to improve this, both on requirements level and human hours.

As for undo - this is part of the new design. I might be wrong, but I believe implementing this with the correct design would be involved. I just wonder, do you mean undo in the sense that you have done something and regret it straight after (so undo last action), or an easier facility to 'un-reconcile' or 'un-allocate'?

Just to add my thanks for the changes, especially 6, it saves in both time and converts annoyance to goodwill....Happy Moday

@Kevin - The explain under the transaction is marked 'in progress', which means a developer is working on it.

I just came back from a 2 week holiday, so just catching up with stuff and will have a better idea tomorrow.

Anyhow, this one will need a lot of QA on our side, so I doubt it will go live anytime in the next 2 weeks.

Sooo...

4, 6, 16 and 17 are done.

8 should go live by the end of the day.

We believe that once a transaction is explained, the system correctly picks the next transaction in all cases. Please report any issues on that front here.

And also... please meet Peter. He's the developer who's been working terribly hard in the last few weeks on the bulk of these improvements.

Peter, say hello please.

Oh hello, nice to meet you :)

Oh Roey, you've ruined the illusion it was all your hard work!! Thanks to you both, it's been great to see a bit of ongoing development first hand.

Look forward to point 8 going live...

Point 8 works a treat guys, thanks!!

@Martin,

Could you elaborate on 14 - "And a reverse running total to show how much is left to allocate could be useful if possible and not made redundant by other improvements."

Thanks, Roey

Hi Kevin

Been looking at number 9 and just wanted to give some background as to why it works like it does. If I always record bills from supplier A, I want all the detail (account, VAT treatment etc) held on Supplier A's "invoice defaults", then, when the payment appears on the bank statement all I need the bank import rule to tell know is that payment relates to Supplier A and so present me with a list of bills on the explain screen for allocation or reconciliation.

If the rule also contained the bill defaults (account, VAT treatment etc) the explain screen not only shows me the bills but also completes the transaction fields. The risk here is that a lazy, tired or inexperienced user will just hit the large Add transaction button down the bottom and thus duplicate the cost.

Leaving the defaults on the supplier for bills and on the bank import for other suppliers, where you post directly from the bank entry, avoids the duplication.

The above is not from anything I've read it's just that when I started using CB I was that lazy, tired or inexperienced user and ended up duplicating mobile phone and other costs.

^^^ Extremely good point duly noted - I actually came across the same situation today, client had doubled up on there salary payments!

Roey - re: point 14 I can't remember exactly ! I know that I have seen a useful function where if you have £500 spent and allocate £100, then it shows £400 left to allocate in a prominent position. I think we may already have this, if so that would be fine However, just having been allocating a lot over the last few days, one irritating feature is that if you are working through your unexplained items ( the hide unexplained has worked brilliantly - thanks) , the focus keeps jumping back to the top of page one (particularly annoying if you are on page two or three). can it not revert to its position in the list ?

Hi Kevin - on the unallocated sum still remaining this is the sum shown bottom left in the transaction area, it gradually reduces as you allocate or reconcile items, I agree though, whilst a large number, in terms of physical size, it is away from all the action.

Maybe filling the box with colour might highlight it sufficiently? I'd favour a pretty light green :-)

I clearly need to upload a picture so you realise the post was from me not Kevin ! Trouble is he is much younger and more good-looking than me.

So sorry Martin - last night I knew it was you, this morning I saw Kevin's photo....you are right about age, it's likely I may beat you on that, ie more doddery

@martin,

This back to page one jumping shouldn't happen. We'll do a bit more QA but I might have to contact you directly to get some more info as for how to reproduce this.

Would help if others confirm they have experienced the same 'jump to page 1' in the last couple of weeks.

Roey, it still does not scroll me back to the list after "add transaction" is clicked. I thought this was fixed or has it not been yet?

Hi James

I don't think it supposed to scroll back up at present. The issue is, because it remains down the bottom (to quickly add the next transaction), you can't clearly see what the next transaction actually is.

Therefore, this solution is being worked on but is taking some time:

file

Hello James,

Currently it should always scroll you back down to the explain form, automatically selecting the next explainable transaction up in the list. It's really strange if this works for you differently. Can I ask you what browser do you use? I'll try to look into this next week and if I manage to figure out what's happening, I'll check if the upcoming modification which Kevin mentioned solves this or is it something that we'll still need to fix.

Basically like you can see on the screenshot in Kevin's reply, we'll move the explain form up inside the transaction list and it will always appear under the selected transaction. When you click on 'Add transaction', it will scroll down to the row of the next explainable transaction. Hopefully it will be more convenient this way.

Yes, quarterly reconcile going through for me, too. The improvements in the bank account explanation are long overdue!

Hi Kevin and Daniel, the modifications which will move the explain forms right below the selected transaction are ready and we're already around the end of the quality assurance phase. If nothing serious comes up, I would say that you can expect to see this on production sometime next week.

Thank you for your patience :)

Fantastic news Peter, will be a real time saver.

Appreciate the quick feedback...

Agreed. The current system is just a bit annoying!

I hope we can tab through the fields on the new one.

Hi Dan - which fields do you mean?

In the explain box. For example, once I press "B" to select the only supplier I have that has a name beginning with B, if I press tab, the focus simply disappears instead of moving to the Account box for me to press "T" for Tech Support or "O" for Office365, and so on.

If I press tab three or four times (depending on what is on the screen) to get past the Add and Edit and Refresh buttons then the focus reappears on the Account selector.

This is counter-intuitive (to a keyboard monkey like me, anyway).

So you're saying you'd expect the tab to jump straight from the supplier downdown box to the account dropdown box, skipping the edit/add/refresh options?

Short answer - yes.

Long answer - the problem is because when you press tab (which has been used as the key to switch between fields since Windows 3 in 1990, and possibly before then but I'm not that old) the focus simply disappears, leading me to the conclusion that tabbing through the form is not possible.

I don't disagree, I tab a lot but if I wanted to use the edit/add/refresh buttons i'd most likely grab the mouse. Skipping would therefore make sense.

I think what we've got here though is a prime example of development time being used to please a very small number of users. Can CB justify putting somebody on the job (i've got no idea of the effort involved) when you (and now me) are pretty much the only ones who seem to care.

I know first hand that's one of the things they have to think about on a regular basis, they're still a relatively small team so development time is precious.

I think a lot of people are "passive appreciaters" and it's only a handful of accountants who bother to try to improve the software. I think the date thing is brilliant (finally) and the quick allocate with one click, but these things take a long time to come through. I think development time is too scarce a resource and wish they would have a big short term effort into a big push on long term "issues" eg credit notes

To me, it's a fault in the design. And it's a really trivial fix; one that would take less than five minutes, literally, to fix (although I appreciate CB's internal QA process would be longer).

HTML has long had an attribute called "tabindex" that you can use to define how the tab key should move through a form. In fact I have just tested this myself; all a developer would need to do (which should have been done beforehand on such a keyboard-intensive and often-used form, but that's just IMO) is put tabindex=1, tabindex=2, tabindex=3 on the form's input fields. This would allow the proper indexing to take place.

More info on why it is important (the headline "Remember, not everyone uses a mouse" is key here...) http://webdesign.about.com/od/usability/a/aa071105.htm

Literally a five minute fix.

@Martin - nail/head re the scarceness but when things like MOSS and AE crop up I don't think they've really got much choice - it's a juggling act to say the least.

@Daniel - right there is why I stick to the calculator and let others comment when it comes to techie bits. Point very much taken though, i'm sure the likes of Peter will be along with his opinion in due course.

Daniel you're right, the order of tabbing through the form fields can be quite easily manipulated and can be done quickly, so I'll just do this for you now on the explain form and it will be included in the update next week.

Kevin you're also right and thank you for explaining all of that about limited resources to everyone. Basically there are a lot of small problems around which could be fixed relatively quickly but as Kevin said, our resources aren't limitless and additionally we might not even always notice these kind of "smaller" problems on our own.

Managing resources is not always a trivial thing to do, in order to try to get the best out of developer time, work needs to be planned and decisions have to be made about what we're going to work on, so I hope you understand that we can't just throw everything away every time a quickly fixable but not so critical problem comes up. Of course this doesn't mean that we don't care about these problems, it only means that fixing them can sadly take much more time than the net time required for fixing the actual issue. I understand that this can be frustrating sometimes but believe me, we're trying hard to keep everyone happy :)

You can always make sure that we know about these issues you have by posting them here on the community (I know that you're already doing that), our support team is monitoring them regulary.

Have a nice weekend and thank you for all of your input :)

Hi All

Just to confirm that I and others have been checking over the repositioning of the explain box and, as far as I am concerned, from a user's point of view, it's there, so just one more deep breath.

The tabbing discussion is interesting and certainly, when I used to have to fill in loads of fields on a DB screen in the 80s & 90s it was a godsend but I have to say that in the CB bank explain I might only need use it in 5% of the lines I (or clients) input.

In the majority of cases the bank rule will determine either just the supplier/customer, and present the unpaid or reconcilable items, making the rest of the explain box redundant, or will pre-fill the fields for me. Consequently it's only for new items that I might need it but, even then, I'm inclined to hit the setup rule button and, although again I don't bother, you can use tab.

As discussed above the order of preference in which fields are selected by tab will change user to user plus there are several fields that will appear or vanish depending on toggles (discounts, projects, currency, VAT treatments etc).

I have no technical knowledge of all this so I'll make sure the dev team are aware of Daniel's comments.

Martin makes a good point about "passive appreciators" in the accounting community but I'd make the point that there are thousands (rather than hundreds) of these in the user community and they can all turn into aggressive dissenters if you happen to change the position of a box or even a colour without warning.

This is why it's so important that as many people as possible take more notice of this site so that they can see what's being suggested and that we judge whether a suggestion made and voted on by 20 people is likely to be appreciated by more than say 25.

Finally, just to second Kevin's point above about developer juggling, it is a classic situation that as software becomes more popular and gathers more users demands for "why doesn't it do things my way" will abound requiring the whole company from marketing to developers to filter and assess for the enhancements that will suit the most users.

Personally as well, what I don't want to see is what happened to deskbound software which started out reasonably simple but, to out-do competitors and to make themselves look new, they constantly added buttons and whistles until it became overburdened and unusable by anyone other than relative experts.

By definition, they have to practice "agile" development because with little warning something arises that must take all of their attention be it from this site, tickets, general feedback or changes in legislation. The last one in particular must always take priority and sometimes this might not be a RTI, AE, VAT MOSS project it can also arise when a user stumbles across say a rare VAT issue that is unlikley to cause a problem to many but, technically, makes the software non-compliant.

Thanks Péter, you beat me to it :-)

Peter - awesome, thanks. I know that it is a very small percentage of people who would appreciate the tabindex being set correctly, but, as I said, it's something that has been a pinnacle of good GUI design from the very start of GUIs (almost). So to have it in something which I have to spend 10-20 hours using is very beneficial. To me, and to the rest of the keyboard monkeys, anyway. :)

The cut-in fix just went live when I was in the flow of explaining a statement.

Looks great!

I have nothing better in my life ;-)

I was going to suggest making the statement line in question more prominent somewhere but i'm used to it already so it was probably just a knee-jerk reaction.

Thanks again Peter, much appreciated.

PS I see Daniel's tabbing thingy is live too!

@Peter

You might want to look at how it's handling creating a new entity directly off the back of the statement import now - not as intuitive as before if you ask me (not sure if it's deliberate or not)

Hm I'm not quite sure what you mean Kevin, could you please clarify?

file

file

You now have to scroll down to enter further info instead of it jumping from heading to heading like it used to previously.

It's not however very obvious that you need to scroll.

Ohhhh now I can see what you were talking about. That's definitely a bug, so I'm going to fix it as soon as possible. Thank you for noticing it.

All right, this bug has been fixed now. Once again, thank you for letting me know Kevin.

I'm using the "Minimaal Navigation" lab item because I prefer that over the existing one.

The scrollTo is out on the reconciliation page, it doesn't scroll up enough, it scrolls to the top of the transaction box not the actual transaction being explained: http://i.justphp.uk/13QDy/207QGoDb

When I add a new role from this new rec page it returns me to the dashboard.

Hello James, thank you for letting us know about these issues. I'll check them and I'll let you know once a fix is ready.

Actually James, could you please clarify the second one?

Sorry I meant rule not role. When doing the bank rec I can click the green + button to create a rule, when I do that it returned me back to the dashboard so i have to go all the way back to the reconciliation and start again, bit annoying!

Ah ok, thank you for the extra info. I'll look into this.

Hi James

When hide explained isn't selected the focus jumps to the next transaction after explaining one - great. When selected it jumps back to the first unexplained transaction - quite annoying if you're leaving a handful till the end but it keep jumping back to the start.

Just come across Kevin's point above and agree this is really undesirable.

Also, I have a work colleague who uses the bookkeeping much more than me and she says she finds the expanded window quite a distraction and not a pleasing presentation - just wants a list of items and select the one she will go to. How about the ability to toggle this on and off ?

I presume you mean the new explain window Martin?

I think it's great but the ability to collapse it might actually prove useful. For instance, if i've got a handful of transactions I need the client to look at I copy/paste into a spreadsheet for the clients' attention - the big explain window makes that a formatting nightmare now.

Hi again James, I fixed the scroll positioning issue which happened when you used the "Minimaal Navigation". It isn't deployed to our production servers yet but should be probably sometime tomorrow, I'll let you know once it is.

I couldn't replicate the issue you had when you added a new import rule. If I do that, it brings me back to the explain page as it should, and not to the dashboard. By the way, by dashboard do you mean Home > Dashboard? Or do you meant that if you go and add a new rule then some of the fields you previously filled in for the transaction would be lost?


Kevin and Martin: I'll look into this issue regarding hide explained, it really should behave the same way in both states.

As for the collapsing the explain form suggestion, I'll discuss that with my colleagues and I'll get back to you once we figured something out. Just to be clear, are you saying that she finds that difficult to see which rows contain the transactions when the explain form is showed inline the list below the selected transaction? Because other than that, she can still choose the transaction she wants to continue with, I'm not sure I completely understand the problem. Kevin's reasoning makes sense, but for that purpose an export might be better but that's just an idea.

James, sorry for the delay I forgot to reply. The scroll position fix for the minimaal navigation is deployed for a while now, so it should work properly now. Regarding the other issue, could you please reply to my previous question?


Kevin and Martin I managed to reproduce and fix the bug which caused jumping back to the first unexplained transaction when the "hide explained" filter was enabled. This will be deployed sometime this week.

I was talking about adding a new import rule when reconciling, at the bottom of the page is that green plus icon for creating the new rule from the current line your explaining. Instead of returning back to the reconciliation page it returns me to the clearbooks dashboard.

@ Peter

"Kevin and Martin I managed to reproduce and fix the bug which caused jumping back to the first unexplained transaction when the "hide explained" filter was enabled. This will be deployed sometime this week."

Great to see that's gone live - thanks.

@ Peter

If you do a mass update the bug is still there.

Thank you Kevin, I'll take a look at that.

Hi all

Regarding Kevin's point 7 and one payment/receipt covering more than one bill/invoice not being possible, if the bill/invoice is unpaid then one sum on the bank statement can be allocated to several items.

The problem comes with bills/invoices that have been Quick paid. In this case if you have one sum covering many (eg having paid several cheques in on a paying in slip, or making one internet payment to cover two supplier's bills) you will not be presented with these items to "reconcile" when you chose the customer or supplier. So you have to either undo all the quick pays to make them unpaid (a problem if the VAT returns' been done) or delete the bankk statement entry and "tick" the items in the bank account.

As Kevin says, having to delete items from a bank import should be a last resort, but I have to do it frequently.

This is a design flaw and it encourages people not to use quick pay, when in most other cases, quick pay is of real benefit.

For reference, a work around suggested by Kevin is to use manage money rather than quick pay, entering the total sum and splitting that over the unpaid bills/invoices. This makes it easier to match the sums visually, but you still have to delete it on the bank statement

@ Peter

If you do a mass update the bug is still there.

Hello @Kevin, I didn't manage to get to that bug yet but it's on my list. I will make a comment here once it's done, I'm sorry for the delay.

Hi @Kevin, the mass update bug should be fixed now. I'm really sorry for the delay!

Thanks Peter and no worries at all, I wasn't particularly chasing, just thought it had been done already so was re-reporting it!

@Peter - sorry, still doing it i'm afraid...

A new one to chuck into the pot for what it's worth....

Move the 'reconcile' button when viewing a bank statement so it's not stuck way down the bottom. I've got 3 months worth open and because you can't rec part-paid or multi-paid items via the import i'm having to delete tick and scroll to the bottom each time.

Have the reconcile button 'floating' or even a little R sign next to each line.

Reply to this idea

Attach images by dragging and dropping or upload
 

Your comments will be public and can be answered by anyone in the Clear Books community.

Find out what we do and who we are