I really like the Bank tagging facility, saves a lot of time. I seem to have generated three errors over the last year though as I log the payment when a cheque comes in or have been notified by a client of a BACS payment.
All well and good but when I pull in the bank statement and start tagging, of course the bank gives a different name to mine and not all duplications get caught. Not sure how I have done it but I seem to have allocated one payment from a client and two to suppliers twice. I tried to delete these but I have since run a VAT return and they appear to be locked.
Not sure how it let me allocate payments twice really?
My client one £76.80 and to Suppliers, one at £807.50 and another dupe at £2303.00
My Quickfile account is showing £2904.36 less than it should, which isn’t quite a tally even with that above corrected but would be a lot closer, be great if I could fix it!
You need to be careful when manually logging payments and then importing from a CSV. It’s always best before you commence with any tagging to reconcile the balance, and preferably just stick to one method. As you’ve committed these items to VAT returns you would need to roll-back the VAT return to remove the locks…but please read on.
Instead of doing that would you could do instead (I would recommend this) is to issue counter payments on the same dates and tag them as a refund for the duplicate tagged invoice. What this will do is correct your bank balance and when you file the next return it will reverse the entries so everything will then tally.
Thanks Glenn, I will try and stick to just the bank csv from now on. Just that I get clients saying I have paid you after getting automated reminders. I could roll back the first reminder further to get around that problem.
Counter payments sound safer as you say, I will have a word with my accountant before I do anything else to the current account. All the dupes are vat free anyway I believe as print related.
What I mean by counter payment is simply a reverse of the duplicate bank entry. So you would find the duplicate entry on the bank then add a new transaction to cancel it out, that will then bring your bank balance back inline.
thanks for the explanation Glenn, much appreciated and now sorted!
My accountant said isnt there a way of doing a quarterly reconciliation. I said I couldn’t see that option. Someone else said on here that tagging items them switching pages loses the tag. That would be a good option via cookies or similar if that could be done. Either that or showing more than 50 items per page so we can tag a long list. 200 or 300 would do it. (that would be far easier for you too) I know you say about not wanting to cause bandwidth issues for others or something like that but it is quite an occasional task to want to tag up items.
I am finding it quite difficult to reconcile correctly and I still have about £150 unnacounted for. I shall just have to leave it but at least the last software I used locked down a reconciled month so it was easier to see where any problems lay.
You mention, best to stick to one method or another but if I read Quickfile notes it says use one or the other or a combination of both. I may still use a combination but be much more careful in future. Love the program otherwise!
When you use the built in bank reconciliation feature within the bank statement area it actually will extend the page to show 500 records per page. I recall the other post you mentioned but I wasn’t aware that it did this at the time, although it’s been like that from the beginning.
Using the reconciliation feature you can also set your own date range, so you can do a monthly or quarterly bank reconciliation. As bank feeds become more prevalent, bank reconciliation will become obsolete, the bank will effectively always be up to date. I use the Barclays feed and I haven’t reconciled a bank account for ages
sorry but If I select a wide date range it only ever shows a max of 50 per page and as per the other guy, if i tick something and then go back the ticked item is cleared so it makes it very difficult not to lose track.
I shall just have to use bank feeds in future and get the accountant to adjust the £239.40 that I am out and cant easily fix.
Having done it the was suggested Glenn, and factoring in for the items not on the list it actually now seems to tally ok!
Anyway, final point I would add to aid ease of use is this:
When doing a reconciliation and ticking off against a statement. Users might want to click on the tagged item and have a look at the invoice to see what detail that had. Of course it then loses all the ticked items when going back. I can get around this as I have a 27" screen and open two browser screens.
What would be really helpful and a simple fix is to have the opening item bounce up in a new tab so that the existing clicked items stay intact. Simple matter then to have a quick look at the invoice etc and then get back to tagging
There’s a little trick you can use to quickly preview items without losing the reconciliation screen. Open up the tagged dialogue hold the CTRL key and click the link, this forces the browser to open the page in a new tab.
This should work for all major browsers. I actually use it all the time in Quick File… but we will consider having the invoice open in a new tab by default as I can see that being very annoying!
EDIT:
Now these links will always open in a new tab… just updated!
thanks for being flexible, getting to be a great accounts package! Cant believe I have been using it for nearly a year and a half already. Couldn’t go back to my old MYOB now.
