More preset date options for routine searches on bank entries, invoices etc

I have been using QF for about 6-8 months and am in the process of moving everything across from another cloud service and most everything is acceptable but I find the date range search very clumsy and slow. On the other service you get a tab which has preset date ranges ready to go at the click of a button and I pretty much only ever use this kind of search for all accounts. You get a drop-down list of each month your accounts cover and each financial year.

The other trouble is when you have done some work within the date range (bulk processing) it always reverts back to the main start page of ‘that’ account so you need to re-enter the range again.

Is this something you could introduce? Or am I missing something?

Preset date ranges definitely save a lot of time and it’s certainly something we want to get right.

Some of the reports (e.g Chart of Accounts, P&L) do use a preset drop-down. Were there other specific areas you’d like to see these options? The preset drop-downs we use tend to just cover accounting years, would it help if these also contained more refined options e.g. months, quarters, etc?

Thank you for the reply Glen.
The example you give of what you already have implemented is of course useful but really is something that I’m guessing is quite necessary to examine those particular accounts sections.

The sections I am talking about are Bank Accounts, DLA, Purchases, Invoices, pretty much all the entry side of things.

At the risk of being long-winded -

When I want to search for a particular entry, I generally know what month it is in, and this could even be a month in a previous year. Having a drop-down box which lists all the periods on file by month (e.g. Jan '12) is a massive work-flow improvement compared to opening the search box and flicking through the calendar to the right month of the right year and entering a start and end date period.

As i said previously, when adjusting entries in this way it is also ‘necessary’ to be sure that you stay within that search period and not have the page default to the entire history of that account…

More broad date ranges like financial year are also very helpful as many accounts only have a few entries and therefore you can see the entire year in a page.

Additionally, to have the calculation (or running calculation) of/to that period that is chosen as a total at the top/bottom would also be a useful thing.

A Quarterly set date range is probably also useful, but maybe only in certain cases (VAT?) as this might just create too long a drop-down menu.

Further thinking to that could be that the drop-down menu has sub menus by financial year which drops to each month of that year, that would reduce the size of the menu which would be necessary for those with many years of accounts.

Does that make sense?

Regards

Adam

Thank you, that does provide quite a bit of detail for us to consider.

I am going to change this thread to a “Feature under consideration” so I can track this and update you when we’ve had a chance to review this in more detail.

My pleasure

If it is useful for you to have me beta test what you come up with I’d be happy to do so.

If you mean what I think you mean, that is already there, though in small faint, easily missed text -at the the top of the column of numbers.

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Oh I see, thanks for pointing it out.

@notanaccountant we’ve just recently developed a new date range selector that I think will solve quite a few of the problems raised.

I’ve created a separate post on this here:

New Preset Date Selectors

Please do let me know what you think.

Well done and thank you, from a first little go it seems good. And you sorted it really quickly!

I might only say that the tabs that are greyed-out look a bit like they are not able to be used because their titles are also greyed. Maybe just keep the title text black? The grey tab and the lines should be ample to get the idea.

Cheers

Adam

Excellent!

I agree about the greyed tabs, I will ask for that to be updated in the next release.

Hi Glenn

Will it be possible to add a date range option to the balance sheet so that one is able to pick up balance sheet data from and to a specific date.
At the moment it shows ‘date to’ but not able to pick the start date. I noticed that I needed this option for clients whose accounting period is more than 12 months. ‘Date to’ only picks up last 12 months data.

Also good idea to add the dare range to tax summary As well, for the same reasons as above.

Thanks

Balance sheets aren’t normally presented with a start date, they represent the balance of account at a point in time. I think if you want to see the balance of transactions for the balance sheet codes for a given date range you’d be better off looking at the Chart of Accounts (0-3999) and setting the range there.

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Hi Glen,

Similarly, my accountant had query on an Aged Debtor Report for my financial year 1/8/13-31/7/14.

Unfortunately it seems that the QF report does not cater for a date range.

Looking at the Chart of Accounts for 13/14 it doesn’t seem to show anything like same figures as an Aged Debtor Report in what QF calls a Debtor’s Control Account.

Is it possible to add a date range for the Aged Debtor report?

Regards

Adam

@notanaccountant The ageing report shows the aged position of all creditor or debtor invoices at the current time. What your accountant is probably looking for is the debtor/creditor invoices at the company’s year-end. There is a separate historic invoices report that will show just this.

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Hi Glenn
Thanks, I will try using the COA. I think it might just do the job for balance sheet items.

But not for the tax summary. Do you think it will be good to have it on the tax summaries?

Thanks

Sure, if it’s something that other users will support we can consider this.

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