I’ve noticed that my suspense account is full of duplicate transactions for every single interbank transfer.
Here’s an example. The Suspense account reports that these transactions occurred from one account to the Suspense account, and then from the Suspense account to the other account.
But that’s not what happened. These screenshots show that the transactions were tagged directly from one account to another.
[As a “new user” I cannot post these screenshots, but they show that these two items are tagged directly to each other. I will post them below if the software allows]
Even if I detag the transactions, the entries in the Suspense account persist.
So it seems that QF insists on routing every transfer through the Suspense account. Not only does this bump up the number of transactions (about 8% of my total transactions are duplicate entries in the Suspense account), but it also makes finding genuine rogue entries in the account much harder.
This is quadruple-entry bookkeeping. There is no accounting reason why every transfer has to be cleared through the Suspense account. Is there a way to stop QF from doing this, or alternatively to delete the duplicate entires from the Suspense account?
This is how the transaction was tagged in the first place. Detagging both transactions and retagging like this has no effect - the entries are permanently embedded in the Suspense account.
What exactly is your issue? If the suspense account balances to zero that’s perfectly fine. If it doesn’t, it’s because you have untagged transactions.
That’s how suspense accounts work.
So if you untag something, it still needs a balancing double entry, which would be the suspense account.
When you tag something the movement out of the suspense account will balance it out and a new balancing entry will be made wherever you tag the transaction to.
What you’ve described is exactly how it should work
The only downside is if you’re a very small QF user the extra postings through the suspense account may be enough to tip you over the 1000 nominal entries threshold that requires a power user subscription.
Yes that’s true. I don’t know enough about how qf works in the coding but perhaps once a transaction for example has been tagged it could then delete the suspense account entries instead of leaving it to balance.
Another method maybe to not include suspense entries with matching opposites to be included in the count.
In 3 months I have over 100 entries which are unnecessary duplicates, and they make it hard to find the half a dozen or so actual entries that need attention. I can work around this, but it seems like a very odd way of doing things. There’s no need to route via the suspense account, these transactions could just offset against each other.
And yes, these extra transactions have indeed caused my account to exceed 1,000 transactions. I would probably have exceeded that soon anyway.
It’s not a big issue, it just seems like a very odd way of doing things and totally unnecessary.
Paul, your suggestion of deleting the suspense entries automatically when transactions are tagged is spot on. That’s what you’d expect. What’s the point of duplicate records held forever in a suspense account? That’s not what it’s for.
I don’t suppose it will change, so I’ll just have to put up with it. It doesn’t really cause a major problem, it’s just messy!
Hi @murrayzz1 ,
I totally get what you are saying. I think @Paul_Courtier ideas are logical and sensible. We are already a power user so doesn’t matter about number of nominal entries. I check the suspense account quarterly and have to scan many balancing entries to find the unbalanced ones that needs investigating and correctly resolving/tagging. Feels very tedious. Maybe as my book keeping skills gets better there will be fewer times the suspense account is not balanced out. I just resigned myself to how it is.
Susie
I’m unsure of why you would need to even check the suspense account.
The only entries that go in there are unallocated payments or invoices. OK there may be more than that but my point is, only entries which have no corresponding double entry would be in the suspense account. You could easily find what makes up that account by checking for example any untagged bank entries or any unpaid items.
I think you may be making life more difficult for yourself than need be.
