The best solution is clearly that the banks sort their act out and realise it’s the 21st century and the money does not get put into an envelope and posted to the other bank - I suspect I’ll be long gone before that happens!
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The problem here is that in simple accounting terms a bank transfer is a credit on one nominal ledger and a debit on another. You can’t have a credit on one date, then the debit 3 days later, as for those 3 days your books won’t balance.
In reality it needs to be sitting somewhere for that interim period and therefore strictly speaking it would spend those 3 days on an intermediate ledger. You could use suspense but that will interfere with your P&L, if you’re going to do this it would make more sense to use a balance sheet code.
Alternatively I would take the transfer date on the receiving bank and tag from there. The sending bank still owes you that money, even though it’s disappeared off their ledger, so from an accounting perspective it’s accurate.
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From a purist point of view I agree with the solution, in the real world though it’s a long way from pragmatic since the reality is it means deleting the donor transaction and then letting QF recreate the same transaction a few days later - which then means without an intermediate nominal (which the bank call the intermediary bank to justify a non quantifiable charge that occurs beyond anyone’s control) the bank account does not reconcile
If you have feeds on the accounts at both ends then the simplest solution is to create a dummy bank account for “funds in transit” and then have bank tagging rules that pick up all transfers in and out of any of your real accounts and tag them as transfers from/to that. Then your main bank accounts will always match the statements and the “funds in transit” account will represent the “missing” money that has left one account and not yet arrived in the other. In cases where the dates on both ends are the same that’s fine too, the money will go into and out of the transit account on the same date and the only cost is two extra nominal entries.
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Thanks, can I create a rule that will work on transactions already uploaded?
Be interested to know if there is a way as I’ve never managed it. Any auto tag I’ve created only ever works with a new set of pulled in transactions. It never works with existing ones.
I’m afraid not. Tagging rules will work only on newly created transactions.
I was getting confused with another piece of software, but it looks like there’s a feature request thread for this if you want to add your vote
@QFSupport, just an add to this I can now confirm that SOMETIMES QF does recognise transactions on different dates match up when you do a transfer but not on others, please can you help me understand how this functionality works or maybe if there is a bug, I have attached a few screenshots
From what @glenn said above I don’t think that’s supposed to be happening because that would make it unbalanced
Yep that was my concern. To be honest I’ve no issue or working like that it’s more the randomness of it happening (or not) - I’d far rather QF prompted to say it hadn’t found a matching transaction BEFORE it created one - it would save a lot of tome - for me anyway!
I’ll be honest I wasn’t fully aware about this, but upon further investigation it seems there’s an exception to allow matches that are 1 day apart. It doesn’t create a temporary inbalance as the contra entries for each transaction are posted to suspense and they don’t get removed for bank transfers. So the suspense entries keep the accounts balanced for that interim period.
There’s a good case for extending this window beyond 1 day, however it’s not a good idea to have those transitory balances sitting on suspense for a long period of time, as that will interfere with the profit and loss report.
I will create a ticket to look into this further so we can possibly extend the time, but then use a different interim code so it can stay on the balance sheet.
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Thanks. Do you also agree it would be good to be told that QF is about to move a non-matching transaction before it does it ?
Really would save a lot of hassle - in my view.
Thanks
Regards
Ross
Hi @Vistaro
Generally any changes like this are best to be proposed as a #feature request, so other users can add their comments too.
If you’re stuck with anything though, please don’t hesitate to let us know 
I’ve updated this thread to a feature request (as there’s already some detailed discussion)… We’ll track from here.
I have done this to handle transfers between current and credit card accounts which are often a day out. I created a “CC Suspense” account and use it as the contra for both transactions.
So far it has worked perfectly.
Hi, Yes, that works fine, just trying to save time by automating it and saving the need for additional transactions
OK we have now updated the bank transfer handling to allow for match suggestions that extend to +/- 5 days from the transaction date. This should help with those situations where the debit and credit dates differ from one account to the other (e.g. PayPal, Amex and other payment processors).
If you select a bank transfer match that is not on the same date, the interim balance will now be posted to a balance sheet code called “Balance Sheet Suspense” (2997). This keeps those interim movements on the balance sheet as an asset / liability and makes it easier to track.
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