There is no possibility currently to change the reference of the items in the bank statement view (…/secure/bank/statement.aspx).
This feature could be useful since sometimes the reference picked up automatically by the bank feed is not really descriptive or I may need to change a sort code and account number with the actual name of the account.
There is the feature of adding a note, but this is not visible unless the yellow symbol is clicked. This is inconvenient if there are many items in the view, since the user needs to manually click each one of them to find the interesting one.
Usability could be improved by giving the user the ability to show a custom text in each line by default (this could be initially set to the same string as the reference from the bank, but modifiable).
The original string could maybe retained and made visible is needed by clicking somewhere on the item.
The only problem I foresee with this is that the bank statement reference is used as a means to detect duplicate entries. With the ability to change the references there’s the risk that duplicates may appear in the bank if an overlapping statement is uploaded. Also if you change all the descriptions it can make reconciliation with the original statement more difficult. The notes tool was there from the beginning to allow notes to be appended to transactions.
No but i meant you keep the original string (call it bank reference) and add a further field (call it user field).
The user field can be set by default as the bank reference.
The field shown in the main view would be the user field (changeable). Or, if you have enough space you would show both.
further advantage would be that the user could be able to search in the page using the normal browser search capability.
Say i have a page with many transactions i want a specific payment. At the moment i need to remember the amount and search that one, cause the bank reference is the cheque number (useless).
As you see i cannot know how much somebody called, say, John received. Yes i understand there are ways to do it. there is always one way to do it, I can, for example download a CSV.
I am suggesting a usability improvement. If I had another field in this view which was ALWAYS visible, apart form the bank reference, then i could add the name of the person or what ever else i want use to discriminate the items ( such as, say, the company they work for, the department or the city of residence ) in that user reference field.
Advantage would be that i could DIRECTLY see a view with the informations which are relevant to me and not the information which was relevant to the bank (in this case a cheque number, that, for me, is basically completely useless).
Yes i can manually click on each one of the small yellow symbols, i know that. i can click each one of them and see were John is. That would definitely work. Not too practical, though…
I take your point but we also have technical considerations that we need to take into account. This data is pulled out of a database containing over 10,000,000 records. Adding a new field has very real consequences on how quickly data can be pulled out inserted and updated. There would need to be a very strong case for adding a new field, I just don’t think the upside is significant enough to warrant doing this.
Ok fair enough
at least you could let the user have some more flexibility in the view? say for example decide to add a new field in what get shown? i am thinking, for example, to add the name of the counter party receiving the money to the view.
A table of data is a very useful thing in my opinion and can provide lots of info in a glance. If there was some more flexibility in the view it would just be perfect.
I see the dilemma here, particularly with cheques…I’m just trying to work out the best way to solve this. It would be nice if the banks provided more info on the cheque to start with. A lot of what we do these days is trying to work around these sorts of problems.
