On Apr 4, 3:46 pm, Kevin Hoctor <[email protected]> wrote: > Now you sound like you're just trying to pick a fight. Both are open > transactions but one lets you know that the bank has seen it as > cleared. Why wouldn't you want to know which transactions came in from > a direct download or an import versus those that you have entered > manually? >
Kevin, I'm not trying to pick a fight and I apologize if it came off that way. In my short time using MoneyWell I've found my initial approach to many things has been going "against the grain" and once I better understood how MoneyWell works I changed my ways and I'm trying to get to the same point here. Prior to using MoneyWell I tracked everything in Excel and evolved my system over the years to protect myself from various mistakes I had made. I'm trying to figure out exactly where I can get into trouble with MoneyWell and how I can protect myself. Maybe I'm just being overly paranoid here, but it seems to me that unless I have a 1-to-1 mapping between funds in my buckets and funds in my cash flow accounts and a method to check this, I'm eventually going to run into trouble. Even if I respect my bucket amounts, my bank is still going to charge me overdraft fees if I screw something up! I'm probably missing something here, but the only way I see to achieve this protection is to make sure the daily balance in my registers matches the physical account balance at all times, which means I need to use the "Posted" date for all transaction dates and I either need to avoid using the "Open" type or if I do, I need to immediately mark posted transactions as "Reconciled" so I can use the reconciled balance as my check point. I'd love to simplify things and just let MoneyWell handle all this, but I'm not seeing where MoneyWell would prevent me from making a mistake or how it would help me find and correct that mistake. This is particularly a problem when you first start using MoneyWell and don't fully understand how everything works. Here's a simplified example to clarify what I'm talking about: - I deposit a $1000 bonus check into my checking account, but mark it as bucket optional so it doesn't affect my cash flow (and artificially inflate my income graphs) - At this point my checking account balance is larger than my bucket balance as my buckets are not accounting for everything - I transfer $600 of this bonus into a savings account to earn interest - A few months later I decide to transfer the remainder of my bonus to savings but I mistakenly transfer $500 thinking that is what was left - I now have a shortfall of $100 in my checking account relative to my bucket balances but I don't know it - I respect my bucket balances yet I manage to drain my checking account and get an overdraft fee - I go back and try to figure out where I went wrong, but since the daily balance reported by MoneyWell never matched my bank statements to begin with, I have no "sync" points I can start out to see where I started diverging. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
