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Transaction Filter report on a Category picks up Account reconciliation status

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1. 1 Ben Spencer on 15 May, 2016 03:32 PM

   I think I recall people actually asking for this change at some point. I really doesn't make any sense to consider the cleared status on the category side as the transaction on the category side is not in a bank account and so never gets cleared by the bank.

   Ben Spencer
   Infinite Kind Support

2. 2 ian on 15 May, 2016 04:34 PM

   Thanks for the fast response. Obviously, I’m going to disagree.

   The whole point of double-entry bookkeeping is that there are 2 sides to
   every transaction that exist separately in the ledgers. So what if the
   category side is not in a bank account, transactions on the category side
   can still be reconciled against other records….. as I do.

   I can appreciate that other people might want to look at the status of the
   account side of the transaction, but I’m not happy that you have enabled
   that at the expense of the previous capability. There appears to be no
   mention of it in the change logs.

   In fact, I don’t believe that the change was intended. If it was, then it
   had not been done consistently because the view via the Expense Category
   route shows the status of the category side. So does the Transaction
   report.

   I’m sticking with this being a bug.

   Ian

   *From:* Ben Spencer [mailto:[email blocked]]
   *Sent:* 15 May 2016 16:33
   *To:* [email blocked]
   *Subject:* Re: Transaction Filter report on a Category picks up Account
   reconciliation status [Problems #23991]

3. 3 Ben Spencer on 15 May, 2016 05:05 PM

   I understand the "cleared" flag to mean that a user agrees that a transaction in their account register is also on a statement produced by the bank. They mark a transaction as cleared as part of the reconciliation process where they check off transactions in their register with those on the banks statement. How exactly are you using the cleared flag in a category?

   Ben Spencer
   Infinite Kind Support

4. 4 ian on 16 May, 2016 10:36 AM

   Hi Ben.

   Yes, I use the cleared flag on the account side of the transaction in just
   that way.

   But I also have several situations where I regularly pay for things on
   behalf of someone else and they reimburse me later. So, I might enter the
   transaction into, say, my credit card account with a category of “for X”.
   The card balance will subsequently get paid off from my current (checking?)
   account. And, at some point X will send me a payment for what they owe
   which will probably go into enter into my current account (or any other).

   When the credit arrives, I go to the “for X” Expense Category view, and
   mark the transaction(s) to which the credit relates as “cleared”.

   To see how much X owes me at any time, I was able to run the Transaction
   Filter report to list all the transaction in category “for X” that are not
   “cleared”. I can see them in the Expense Category view as well, but it
   does not show a total.

   In theory, I could enter the credit from X with a category of “for X”, and
   then the balance in the Expense Category would show the net value of
   outstanding transactions, but to keep things tidy, especially if I get one
   credit to cover multiple debits, I would still want to mark the
   transactions as “cleared” (ie reconciled on the category side).

   I have considered using the transaction tag instead of categories, but the
   number of transactions involved become unmanageable without some way to
   tidy up the matched ones.

   I have also considered creating a separate nominal account. Call it
   “X-Loan”, say. Payments out of my credit card could be entered as a
   transfer to the X-Loan account, and credits into my current account could
   be entered as transfers from the X-Loan account. Then I could mark the
   transactions as cleared in the X-Loan account ledger view.

   That would work except that in some cases except that I also maintain
   records of X’s account in my Moneydance file. So, when X pays me what they
   owe, I want to enter the transaction as a transfer from X’s account to my
   current account. With a nominal intermediate account, I would have to
   record the payment as two transaction – one in from X to X-Loan, and one
   from X-Loan to my current account.

   If there are better ways for me to do achieve what I want then, great.
   Open to suggestions.

   Regards

   Ian

   PS and FYI, strictly speaking, in the UK at least, the status might more
   properly be called “reconciled” rather than “cleared” because cleared means
   something slightly different here. Let’s say that I go into my bank branch
   and present a cheque drawn on a different bank. That transaction would
   appear on my bank account statement today. Ie, you would call it Cleared.
   But, because the cheque was drawn on a different bank, it takes several
   days to pass the cheque through the inter-bank Clearing System and for the
   funds to be approved (we call that Cleared).

   Ie, appearing on the account ledger (statement or internet banking
   transaction list) does not mean that the transaction has Cleared.

   An account will have 3 balances: a Ledger Balance, a Cleared Balance, and
   an Available Balance (= Ledger balance – total value of items in Clearing +
   agreed overdraft facility). Ignoring overdraft facilities for now, the
   bank will only let me draw funds up to my Cleared balance, not my ledger
   balance because an Uncleared cheque could be returned unpaid.

   Even if a cheque (or one of the other types of transaction subject to
   Clearing) is returned as unpaid, the original credit entry on my ledger
   would still remain. There would be a second ‘reversal’ transaction entered
   on the ledger. So, it would be OK to mark transactions in Moneydance as
   “Reconciled” as soon as they appear on the ledger. But not to call them
   Cleared.

   *From:* Ben Spencer [mailto:[email blocked]]
   *Sent:* 15 May 2016 18:06
   *To:* [email blocked]
   *Subject:* Re: Transaction Filter report on a Category picks up Account
   reconciliation status [Problems #23991]

5. Support Staff 5 Ethan on 25 May, 2016 12:54 PM

   Hello Ian,

   I personally think creating a separate account for this person would be the best thing to do in your situation. I have often done this by setting up an asset account for particular people that I loan money to or make purchases for, where I put all of their transactions. For example, if I go to the grocery store to buy things for me and another person, I create a split transaction for that charge, categorizing my purchases as groceries, and theirs as their asset account. This is also helpful because the purchases intended for others will not be classified under my groceries category, meaning it won't look like I spent more on that category than I actually did, which would throw things off for my budget and analysing reports later on. It also makes it much easier to track how much someone owes you than any of the other options you describe, since all of their transactions are just in that one account, regardless of what the purchases were. When they pay me back, I simply enter in a transfer from their asset account to my bank account. I can't quite see why you would have to use an intermediate account for this as you describe.

   Ethan
   Moneydance Support

6. 6 ian on 26 May, 2016 01:44 PM

   Hi Ethan.

   I think that what you suggest is the same as what I described as the
   “X-Loan” account. For most purposes, that would indeed work very well, and
   characterising it as an Asset account would be absolutely the right thing.

   But it is not so clean in the situation where I also maintain the records
   of that person’s account in my Moneydance file. Perhaps I didn’t explain
   what I meant by an intermediate account.

   In this situation, I would have MyAccount and the X-Loan asset account but
   also that person’s account (call it XAccount). When I come to transfer
   money from the XAccount to MyAccount to pay off what is owed, I can’t just
   enter a transfer from XAccount to MyAccount; I have to enter a transfer
   from XAccount to X-Loan account, and then from X-Loan Account to
   MyAccount. Ie through an intermediate stage.

   Now I think about it, using a separate asset account is probably no worse
   than using categories, so I’ll give it a try.

   But I stand by my contention that this is a bug, not an intentional
   change. You need to fix it or address the inconsistencies that now exist
   elsewhere.

   *From:* Ethan [mailto:[email blocked]]
   *Sent:* 25 May 2016 13:55
   *To:* [email blocked]
   *Subject:* Re: Transaction Filter report on a Category picks up Account
   reconciliation status [Problems #23991]

7. 7 ian on 22 Aug, 2016 03:38 PM

   Finally got round to rejigging my transactions as suggested to use Asset accounts rather than categories.

   Oh dear. What a waste of time. It makes no difference.

   It appears that the problem with filtering on cleared status is not just limited to categories but to any account type as well. The Transaction Filter report is picking up the reconciliation status of the 'other side' of the transaction.

8. 8 Martin Fuente on 31 Aug, 2016 04:09 AM

   Hi Support team,
   I would like to clarify that cleared flag should not be limited to bank accounts. Clearly the most common use of that flag is that, but there multiple of utilizations of that flag to represent different business escenarios.

   One very simple case is to represent small and temporal loans. It does not make any sense to create individual accounts for each small and temporal transaction, so you can use the cleared flag to determine open or closed loans. Most of accounting systems do that and MoneyDance did that too till recent version.

   I really appreciate your help to solve this bug. The functionality was on in previous versions.

   Thanks

9. 9 bergea on 31 Aug, 2016 06:41 AM

   I agree with Martin, there are many scenarios where it would be very helpful to be able to use the cleared status on other than bank accounts. As Ian has mentioned, this used to be possible in previous versions, and it would be great if it could be reintroduced into the current version.
   Thanks,
   Berge

10. System closed this discussion on 30 Nov, 2016 06:50 AM.