Bank reconciliation and exporting more than 50 transactions at a time

Hi Glenn, Sorry to dig this up again, but I’m really struggling with with this restriction.
I need to export some transactions to CSV, but I can only do so in batches of 50 records.

In addition, since there are no bank account reconciliation features that actually ‘lock’ (for want of a better word, maybe ‘archive’ might be a better one) transactions, if I want to use the checkbox sum functionality to try and reconcile my transactions on screen I can’t because I can only see 50 at a time. If I move to the next page then my ticked checkboxes are lost because they are not tied to the Db, but instead an on screen javascript function.

Actually,I only have a need to export these transactions because I can’t see a simpler less confusing way to make a bank reconciliation. My bank reconciliation can take a few days to do, but with QF I have to attempt to do it in one hit or risk loosing where I’m at. Things are taking an awfully long time, which is a shame since most of the QF features really save a lot of time. Some guidance on how you would use the software to reconcile the bank (including credit card statements) would be appreciated…
Thanks

You can export all your transactions in one go by requesting a backup of your account. The 50 transactions export limit per page must remain to ensure stable performance for all users.

I really think you should reconsider how you are reconciling your bank here. I’m not sure what you’re doing at the moment but you shouldn’t need to export your whole bank account to CSV just to reconcile it. There are a couple of methods for reconciling bank accounts here. The matching tool within the bank statement will go a long way to help you to reconcile against your paper statement. You can also move items around straight from the bank by clicking on the dates and modifying them.

You can also apply locks to all your accounting records in the account settings area once you have reconciled to a specific date.

Thanks Glenn,
Indeed, I do need to review how I’m reconciling my accounts. I’ll give you an example of how I do things currently…

I have a paper credit card statement that’s come in. I have a bank account set up for all CC transactions.

I need to make sure that all items on the statement are on QF, and that the amounts match up.

First, I go through my paper statement one transaction at a time, and check off on the screen the transactions I see on my paper statement. On my paper statement, I tick off with a pencil the transactions that I have checked.

Not all dates are in the correct order, and I take what you say about moving them around.

I have three card users, and each user receives a statement for their card, however, on the screen, all transactions are lumped together in date order. Therefore, it’s not easy to simply look through the table on screen and marry it to the paper.

I use the check box on the screen to mark off the transactions I checked on paper, but when I get to the end of the screen, I have to click to see the next lot of transactions. In doing this, I lose my on screen checkboxes. It’s difficult to know whether I’ve checked a transaction or not in this scenario, especially if any transactions were deleted on the previous page, because then some of the transactions will be pushed to either the page before or the page after.

We use the company credit cards for booking parcel deliveries. Every month, we have at least 50-100 transactions, all with the same price of £4.74 per payment.

The subject of locking transactions is not relevant here, since one would only lock transactions after a VAT return anyway.

Also, this is my forth month of using QF. After my 1st QTR VAT return, will I still see those Q1 transactions in subsequent months? If so, won’t I end up with 50 pages of transactions after a year?

If anyone else is reading, how do you do it…?

Have you tried to use the Match tool instead? Rather than manually mark off each transaction this will allow you to input the open and close balance on the credit card statement and then just follow the running balance from start to finish to see where it goes out.

When you click GO the system will show you the difference between the statement balance and the balance in Quick File. As you go along you can just add in any missing transactions, move the transaction dates around until you get it balancing.

well… I’ve spent today trying to change my way of doings things to get around the issues I’ve had. Feedback is as follows:

I’ve tried to use the match function. To be honest, It’s only been useful as a date filter, since it doesn’t seems to tally the totals up to a recognisable sum. I’m sure that it’s because I don’t know how to use it. I couldn’t find any comprehensive documentation on the function to explain what the software is actually doing… maybe you can point me in the right direction? With a credit card statement, we start at zero and end at the total spent amount… but I just can’t get it to show me the correct figures. I can however see the correct statement balance at in the running total column, so I was able to use that to make sure my figures were ok.

So, your suggestion for using this system to reconcile the credit card statement doesn’t really work for me, especially as I have three cards to reconcile, but only using one account on QF. I would have to set up three seperate bank accounts to truly make this work.

Anyway… such messing around has given me a better familiarity with the software now, so I have found a way to achieve what I need to, albeit in a slightly more ‘round the houses’ fashion.

Other newbies might find this useful…

For a start, when you are entering your credit card purchase receipts, NEVER show them as paid as this will make an entry in the credit card bank account. If you do this, when you come to reconcile, you’ll find it difficult to check through unless you have religiously entered every single transaction as you’ve made purchases.

The best way I have found is to download a csv file from your credit card provider’s website, and then upload it onto QF. This will ensure that every transaction is on QF, so in theory you don’t have to spend time checking all transactions are present. Instead, go through each transaction and tag them up to the scanned receipts.

If QF doesn’t suggest a receipt when you tag a transaction in the bank statement, then simply open another webpage and enter the receipt through the ‘Enter New Purchase’ page. Then,flick back to the bank statement window and tag your transaction… you should find it there now.

For current accounts, I think it’s best to work in the same way, that is, work from the uploaded (or live feed) statement, and simply tag each record.

So ultimately Glenn, after all my time spent today, I can see that by changing my methods I can acheiev most things with the functionality that’s there… but I still maintain that either we be allowed to view more items on one page (I’m talking about max 250 for example), OR code the site to maintain the check box state when one flicks from page to page (much like gmail does).

With the first suggestion, we can everything that’s on one statement on one page. With the second idea, we can achieve the same thing when we use pagination. I do understand very well about server strain, but I don’t think another 150 records is going to make any noticeable difference to the site performance and actually, one might reduce the overhead actually because right now I find myself constantly flicking around making many calls to the server to see different pages. If I could see everything on one page then I’d leave that page open for an hour at a time whilst I work with all the data I need on the same page.

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Thanks for the feedback @gino, I’m sure there are some things we can do to improve the reconciliation process. I admit the situation with reconciling credit cards is a bit different from regular bank accounts and not well supported in QF. Here are two suggested features we could look at.

  • Extend the page limit (only when in reconciliation mode) to 250 entries per page. As this feature is not always on it should have minimal affect on the server resources.
  • Show the balance from 0, I’m not sure it’s necessary to enter an opening balance for Credit Cards?

Regarding the second point, is there a running balance column on your credit card statement? I think this is crucial as without a balance column it may require some other method for reconciliation.

I agree that uploading the statement and matching is somewhat easier, this is the way I’ve always done it. It practically eliminates the reconciliation process altogether, it becomes more of an exercise in matching the entries on the statements to the purchase invoices already raised.

Thanks again for the feedback, I have now entered the above changes into our mid-term development planner, so we can go from there.

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