Manual or Tagging

Feature Request
1

Hi All,
I love QF and have been getting to grips with it for years now…(I’m not very bookkeeping savvy).
I have a request for easier decision making for novices at the point where payments are recorded.
Example: I purchase an item from the internet pay there and then with my card and await delivery.
On successful and correct delivery I would then create a “New Purchase” entry and enter details.
However…
I fall foul of the option at the bottom of the “New Purchase” screen that facilitates a payment entry. If I use this to enter a payment that was made say over the weekend, I would now have two entries in my register… one from the manual entry and one eventually from the overnight feed.

Unfortunately, I now need delete the manual entry and then “make good” using the tagging option, which is a better representation of the purchase payment due to it matching my bank statement correctly.

Would it be possible to offer on the new purchase screen a decider with two buttons that would give a warning that reminds you to use one or the other method.and give a choice to open the manual facility or open the tagging facility.

That way I would be sure to create the new purchase using Tagging (or Manual) saving a cleanup.
Thanks
Kind regards
Chris Perkins

2

Hi @Chris_Perkins

Thank you for your suggestion.

As with all suggestions, we’ll leave it open for other users to provide their comments and feedback before we look at it further.

1 Like
3

I’d thought about this a couple of times after seeing people get confused over which route to take, or why 2 transactions appear on banking screens. It may be worth explaining the 2 routes in more detail in the KB, so e.g. if you upload all bank statements then you don’t really need to log payments from invoices directly.

There’s also Show Matching Bank Transactions Before Tagging from Receipt Hub which I don’t think has been been touched yet? Just changing the button text to search for transactions would be a good start there as it is currently misleading.

4

QF tagging system requires a level of understanding and how it tags, either to an invoice or an entry without one.
I would recommend

  1. tag via bank statement
  2. tag to an invoice only if its an invoice.
    only create a purchase if 1. you are a company and VAT reg. if not then you can simply tag according to the invoice or receipt.
  3. know your suppliers which could be UBER or Westminster Parking or the corner shop.
    So it all depends who you are dealing with.
    Regards,
5

Yes I agree that it can cause some confusion for newer users.

I use QF to manage the accounts for 3 companies and I rarely ever manually log payments to invoices. I raise most sales invoices manually, import the bank statement and then just link the bank entries to the invoices. No bank reconciliation needed. For most purchases I create the backing invoice on the fly from bank tagging.

There are some businesses that can’t really (or prefer not to) operate like this and instead manually prepare and pay down invoices to give a more accurate real time position. If you’re doing this and then importing a bank statement it’s hard for the software to know exactly where the duplicates are.

I think a dedicated KB article would help along with adding more contextual helpers in the application. I re-read the other post you linked to but I’m still not sure if it will help in a big way. Many of these duplicates come from logging payments to invoices either in the payment preview screen or the main payment list.

6

I agree, it might not necessarily help in this particular case and I also tag everything from the banking screen so never use the feature except for tagging to payment cards where I don’t import transactions. The problem I see with that particular feature the way it is is that it is if no use except for if you are 100% certain you have all transactions uploaded and they are all correct and up to date before using it. If I click the button and the entry is on my bank statement in Quickfile then it works but if I happen to click it and the payment hasn’t got as far as the Quickfile statement then I could end up with a duplicate.

It almost needs a slight reworking to make it clearer what will/might happen and a toggle to either automatically add entries to the account or warn before doing so. The reason I mention the toggle is that I do use the feature for e.g. credit cards where I do not import any statements at all and it is all tagged from the receipt hub so I know I don’t need any confirmation there.

I suppose that I have sort of answered my own question there, the button is of no use unless you are using the account as solely marked transactions from Quickfile, or if you are doing it the long way round and doing loads of duplicate checking and reconciling. I think the gist is if you are uploading/importing statements then tag from the bank end, which I suppose is what the KB article will say.