On Apr 4, 5:47 pm, The Watkinson Family <[email protected]> wrote: > While I do agree that there is little additional utility in the > cleared flag, I think that your example is a little artificial. By > depositing a bonus check and not assigning it to a bucket, you are > creating for yourself a problem. If you want to remain synchronized > you have to obey certain rules: >
Hey Blair, Yes, I agree with your rules and follow them myself. My example was admittedly weak, but I guess I'm failing to see a good reason why anyone would need to violate these rules and I'm curious as to why MoneyWell doesn't actually enforce them. For example, your starting cash flow balance should always be the sum of your account balances on that day (excluding any accounts you have in MoneyWell purely for tracking purposes). Why does MoneyWell even give the user a choice here? It just seems like an easy stumbling block for new users that could be easily avoided. > However, these rules do not help you in knowing where the money is, > and it is still possible to overdraft your account without violating > the rules or creating artificial scenarios. > Yes, you raise another good point. To me, this is yet another reason why it is so important to have a 1-to-1 mapping between bucket balances and account balances. The more accounts you have money spread around in, the harder it will be to track down and fix any mistakes. > This is why it is important to track Open transactions. If you write > a check at Church and one at the Grocery store, how can you possibly > know that the money is available in your checking account? I was not arguing that that Open transactions do not need to be tracked. My point was that when I look at the account balances in MoneyWell, my expectation is that they should correlate with the physical balance in that account each day. It's perfectly fine for MoneyWell to provide an estimated balance as well, but it seems of secondary importance to me since the buckets are your primary tool for tracking open/pending transactions. > I think that a "Cleared" total at the bottom of the page would be more > useful than an Open+Cleared+Reconciled total (Reconciled Transactions > are by definition also Cleared). Agreed. > MoneyWell is used in a variety of ways by different people. I still > reconcile my accounts once a month, so sometimes I let small errors go > until the statement comes The problem I see here is that if you don't verify that your actual account balances match your MoneyWell register each time you use the application, you run the risk of missing a transaction, which you wouldn't catch until month end (at which point you've likely overspent). And unless you consistently use posted dates (not transaction dates) you have no way to easily compare actual bank balances to the MoneyWell registers on a given day. Admittedly this would be less of a problem if I manually entered transactions like you (since downloaded transactions have caused most of my problems here) but this is a feature I think most people use, so MoneyWell should really have a solution here. > Others just reconcile the transactions as soon as the > bank posts them. As you said, the reconciled total is useful here > because you can use it compare your daily balances. If there were a > Cleared total, I think this would allow others who reconciled on a > monthly basis do the same (in fact I don't think that you would really > need both--some users would prefer a reconciled total if they > reconcile daily, others would prefer a cleared total, if the reconcile > once a month). > Yes, I agree the Cleared balance would be a big help, but it still feels like we're using a roundabout method to help check compliance with our rules and this is really something that should be enforced by the application itself. I know there are a variety of usages for MoneyWell, but I have yet to see a convincing reason to violate any of the rules you listed. It really seems like the "missing" feature here is a way to easily "reconcile" your bucket balances. I've seen in past threads that Kevin recommended you could always "start over" by moving the cash flow starting date to the current month and setting the balance to the sum of your cash flow account balances on that day. This implies that there is a 1-to-1 mapping between accounts and buckets, but for some reason we only utilize this fact when we first start out. Why not ensure this is always the case since you're relying on this to still be true if you ever need to start over? -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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
