matching bank activity download is evil

hi, Just upgraded to QB2006. I'm an an accountant. I use quickbooks to keep track of my rental property expenses and income as well as my own personal checking account. This is my first time downloading bank acct activity.

I understand that it would be best to enter every transaction by hand into QB and then download activity to reconcile.

To be honest, I am not good about entering all my transactions into QB on a regular basis. I can't even seem to find the time to write out the monthly bills, so nearly all bills are set up for automatic payment.

I wanted to use QB2006 to download banking and credit card activity so that I wouldn't have to enter every single individual transaction by hand.

But my experience when downloading for the first time was that this was not going to work out.

Oh, what a horror this matching is. Nearly every transaction from my Chase account comes in as "Automatic Paymen" (from the direct deposit of my paycheck to the automatic payment of my gym membership and Chase credit card) so I have to create an alias for almost every transaction. boo hoo. I may as well enter the transactions directly into QB to begin with.

And the automatic QB matching is not so swift. One of my downloaded transactions was check #6208 and QB didn't match it to the existing entry in the checkbook register for check #6208. :(

So, what do you think of the downloading feature? Am I using it so incorrectly that it just seems to be awful, or is it really awful?

Thanks.

Reply to
rogue_petunia
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Unless I'm also using it incorrectly it *does* require almost as much work as entering the transactions individually. Actually, its faster for me to enter the transactions in the bank register than to click all over the place when adding via Match Transactions.

It seems to match the ach code vs the name or amount. I can have 15 debits from Hess, from 3 different Hess stores, and QB won't match on "Hess." IMO the system needs alot of tweaking to make it more efficent time-wise.

Reply to
Tee

I agree with you, it is evil. You should not be using the product.. Thank god I'm not your accountant. I can just imagine what a sorry mess your books are in.

Reply to
Allan Martin

Hey Allan, My accountant likes me just fine, thank you very much.

Just because I said I do not like to enter all the info and want a shortcut doesn't mean that I give my accountant a shoebox of receipts and walk away.

I don't like to enter stuff into QB. It's quite dull and boring. True, I don't do it in a timely fashion each month, but by year's end, every transaction is eventually entered and posted it to the proper account.

I hand my accountant a perfectly complete QB company burned onto a CD. All she has to do is plop the CD into her PC, run a few reports off it and file my taxes.

So please, don't claim to my books are in a "sorry mess". They are not and you are quite impolite for implying so.

Reply to
rogue_petunia

Give me a brake. The system (QB) does not need tweaking. What is needed is the ability of the end user to enter a universal optional transaction code with all online transactions that accounting software can use to match transactions. When checks are issued this is not an issue because the check number is used.

Hopefully the banking industry and the leading software vendors will someday get together and come up with a universal system to this effect. Until then, trying to automatically match electronic payments will always be difficult if not sometimes impossible.

Reply to
Allan Martin

I'm no database expert but what I do know of databases makes me think QB can tweak and improve the matching of transactions. Strings that have multiple items to match on are common. So why can't QB's match go something like "if amount = $111 and name contains Hess then prompt user to accept match." That method doesn't rely on debit codes or other merchant/bank data.

I don't think it needs to be as I don't understand why the above scenario wouldn't work.

Reply to
Tee

Reply to
Ed Adams

But there is no guarantee that you won't have two payments that match whatever parameters you give unless there is a unique identifier supplied by the bank. Especially if, as in the OP's case, all the bank sends is "electronic payment" and the amount.

Reply to
Ed Adams

Its unlikely but that's also why I gave, in my simple example, a prompt to the user to accept (or decline) a match.

In his case it *is* a bank fault. In my case, with BoA, there's enough info on debit transactions for it to work...at least better than it does now.

Reply to
Tee

Anyone that depends on downloads to record their transactions will have a sorry mess on their hands.

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Reply to
Allan Martin

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