How do others use the various transaction statuses? This is my understanding of what they should mean, but MoneyWell seems to interpret these slightly differently:
Open: a manually entered transaction that has physically taken place but not yet posted to your account ( Cleared: A transaction that has posted to your account but not yet been reconciled Reconciled: A cleared transaction you have reconciled with your statement at the end of the month Pending: A transaction you plan to make, but has not physically taken place yet Here is where MoneyWell seems to have a different intepretation than me: 1) It seems "Open" transactions are included in the daily balance shown at the bottom of the window. I would expect these to be excluded so that this balance would match up with the daily balance physically in my bank account. Alternatively, MoneyWell could report a fourth balance: the "cleared" balance, but does not. 2) "Cleared" transactions have a text box where you can enter the date the transaction cleared, but the original date is still used in the transaction listing and for the purpose of calculating daily balances. It seems like there should actually be 2 date columns: one for transaction date (used for bucket balances and tracking purposes), and one for posted date (used for account balances and reconciling). 3) "Pending" transactions are included in the daily balance shown at the bottom of the window once their date is in the past, but they do not seem to ever affect the balances listed next to the account names in the upper left of the window. This seems inconsistent. As for workarounds, here is what I've figured out so far: For #1, if you ignore the "Cleared" status and mark anything that has posted to your account as "Reconciled" you can now use the reconciled balance at the bottom of the window to compare to your physical account balance. But now the "Cleared" status seems completely pointless. I'm not seeing how the daily balance currently displayed is useful to anyone unless you never have open transactions. For #2, when I have an "Open" transaction that has finally posted, I change the date to be the cleared date so the balances will match. But, since credit card purchases often post a few days after the actual transaction, this has the unfortunate side effect of moving many of my purchases near the end of the month into the next month. This makes trying to see how well I followed my spending plan difficult. I've also had to resort to using the Memo field to preserve the original transaction date in case I want to look back on it later. For #3, this happens frequently for scheduled transactions I've set up where the bill doesn't get debited from my account on the same day every month. I end up manually changing the transaction day to bump it ahead a few day in the future until the transaction finally comes through and posts to my account. This seems unnecessary since I've marked the transaction as "Pending" - the date shouldn't matter, right? These workarounds seem pretty ugly so I'm wondering if I am misunderstanding how these statuses should be used. I found an older thread from a year ago that seemed to suggest Kevin was considering fixing some of these things, but I couldn't find any updates since then: http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software/browse_thread/thread/e5a40e9e58663bce/1934885729b15353?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=open+cleared+balance#1934885729b15353 Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks, Lance --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "No Thirst Software User Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
