On Apr 17, 7:48 pm, Druzyne <drew.k...@gmail.com> wrote: > A smart bucket could target that. > What else is tripping people up? >
Off the top of my head, here are several ways you can unintentionally screw up your bucket balances: 1) Incorrect starting cash flow balance: instead of automating this based on starting balances, MoneyWell presents you with a single text entry. Other than the obvious potential for math errors, the new user may not fully comprehend what this text box is asking for and fill it in incorrectly. If you have a single checking account, this might not be a problem, but if you have 2-3 credit cards, some savings accounts and maybe some other non-cash flow accounts as Blair mentions, it's not hard to screw this up. 2) Deleted transactions: as covered in another recent thread, it's fairly easy to accidentally delete a transaction (even reconciled ones) and not notice it. 3) Duplicate transactions: If you manually enter a fair amount of transactions or use the scheduled transaction feature, you'll quickly learn that MoneyWell's merge feature is not 100%. Unless you catch these every time, you can easily have duplicate transactions. 4) Incorrect amounts: Sort of a combination of #2 and #3. If you have to manually merge duplicate transactions with slightly different amounts, you might delete the wrong one. 5) Incorrect transaction status: If you have a "pending" transaction that is actually in the past (meaning it should really be Cleared/ Reconciled) it won't count against your bucket balances. 6) Split transaction issues: for some reason, each child of a split transaction can have a different transaction status. If you've manually changed any of these in an attempt to fix some other problem, you can really screw things up, not that this has ever happened to me :) 7) Unbucketed transactions: Obviously if you don't assign a bucket to every transaction you can get in trouble but this is fairly clear from the "Unassigned" smart bucket. However, this can get complicated with non-cash flow accounts as Blair describes or if you get in the habit of using the "bucket optional" feature. 8) Credit card payments: if you pay your credit cards in full every month, your payment should NOT have a bucket assignment. However, if this payment is for transactions that occurred prior to your cash flash start date, it should have a bucket. If the payment is a combination of the two, good luck figuring out what you should do. I'm sure there are others as well. While routinely reconciling your account can catch a lot of these, this is not a guarantee. In addition, tracking down mistakes weeks after you've made them is very painful. Perhaps I am just more mistake prone than others on this thread, but I'm a bit surprised those who are opposed to any kind of enforced checking have not been bit by at least one of these problems before. One thing I've seen discussed above that seems contradictory to me is this notion that if you screw up, you can simply start over by changing your cash flow start date and looking at your balance that day. If this were actually true, then it implies that you have a fixed relation between your account balances and bucket balances. But if you are opposed to enforcing a check on this relationship, then you're obviously doing something that invalidates this assumption and you are NOT safe to start over when you need to! I think this topic has probably been beaten to death at this point. In my experience with developing software I've learned that giving users what they want is actually more important than giving them what they really need. Since several users are opposed to any sort of enforced checking, that is the way Kevin should go. Please just give the rest of us an option to easily do this checking and find some way to help new users avoid these pitfalls. -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 no-thirst-software@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to no-thirst-software+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/no-thirst-software?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
