On Wed, May 31, 2017, at 04:39 AM, Peter McArthur wrote:
> This topic arose in the context of bank reconciliation, so, let’s
> talk about bank reconciliation. The traditional, pen-and-paper way of
> doing it is:
> 1. Go through your accounts and your bank statement, matching them
> item by item, and checking off matched items.
> 2. At the end of this process, there will probably be a few unmatched
> items in your accounts, because they haven’t cleared yet. Make a
> note of these in a Reconciliation Report, and check that they are
> all reconciled next month.> The advantage of this method is that it is
> quick and efficient. That
> mattered a lot in the era of pen-and-paper accounting, but now it
> doesn’t, so I think we should consider its disadvantages too:
> 1. It’s hard to detect and correct errors.
> 2. There is no record of which item in your accounts matched which
> item in your bank statement, so if you ever need to check again
> your work is partially wasted.
> 3. The Reconciliation Report is a new kind of artefact that exists
> outside your core accounting system.> All of the above can be solved if
> we split the bank account into two
> sub accounts: one for uncleared transactions and one for cleared
> transactions. It’s the double-entry way of doing it. They didn’t do
> this in the era of pen-and-paper accounting because it wasn’t worth
> the extra effort, but now it just seems the obvious and natural
> thing to do.
I was very as very interested in this idea, however based on your
example from the other thread I don't understand how you've changed the
situation.
Your example, aiui:
05/25 McDonald’s
expenses:food and drink:fast food £ -0.99
assets:current account:uncleared £ 0.99
assets:current account:uncleared £ -0.99 ; [05/27]
assets:current account:cleared £ 0.99 ; [05/27]
With regard to the problems raised above:
1. This seems to make it no easier to detect and correct errors than a
tick mark on your bank statement. To add the final lines you still
have to go through the statement line by line.
2. There still seems to be no record tieing your entry to the line item
on your bank statement. Had you added a comment containing the exact
details from your statement then you could match. This could also be
accomplished by just numbering the entries on your bank statement and
then adding a cleared line number comment.
3. Agreed as solved if a suitable parser is written.
It seems your syntax could be expanded to solve number 2 by encoding it
as something like:
05/25 McDonald’s
expenses:food and drink:fast food £ -0.99
assets:current account:XYZ £ 0.99
05/27 McD Flughafen Wien
assets:current account:XYZ £ -0.99
assets:current account: £ 0.99
This presumes you can load the transactions from your statement. You
would have to tie the two entries together via the XYZ subaccount where
XYZ is a unique transaction identifier.
A suitable parser could then generate a reconciliation report.
However, this seems to have no significant value for error detection and
correction (item #1) over the existing process you've described or the
process of making tick marks on statements.
I suspect I've missed something in your explanation and look forward to
your response.
Regards,
bex
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