Ideas for #msdyn365bc that would make my job easier when reconciling our bank statements.

First what actually is the job that is being done. It is different if you are a small business with only one major transaction account with up to a dozen transactions per day or a larger business with dozens of accounts and hundreds or thousands of transactions. Are you using corporate cards for credit cards, lines of credit and the list goes on. Given that, the improvements I suggest here I know would help my situation - but I can't claim to know if they will help everyone.

First I have only two bank accounts and a couple of corporate accounts. For me our job is to ensure our bank reconciliation is updated daily to ensure we accurately understand who has paid us, what our cashflow position is and that we have actually paid the suppliers we think we have.

The above job can and is split by many systems - the first is matching a one or more lines on the bank statement to one or more lines in a bank account ledger. The second is applying the amount (if it hasn't already been done in a created ledger) to specific vendor or customer ledger entries.

I think ideally for most this job involved almost no work. We are just confirming the work of a machine that has interpreted the data, taken its best educated guess and is offering us an easy way to confirm or resolve issues as they appear. This isn't rocket science compared with AI or even simple matching algorithms out there in the real world.

As a new customer and user of business central I have no idea why they have separated the above jobs into separate payment and bank reconciliation tasks. I can only assume that once upon a time there was a good reason that is hard to legacy to overcome.

The Payment Application screen is a mess.

In this situation, I have a payment reconciliation journal line that has recognised the correct customer (which does not always happen). Instead of correctly applying the payment from the oldest to newest invoices it just selects a random one. Sometimes its the oldest, sometimes the newest - I can't pick the logic. But it is almost never correct. Furthermore, having correctly guessed the right customer and prioritised the transaction - it is logical that they would be sorted in date order by each customer or vendor account. Instead it's random and all over the place. In our case in which invoices generally are end of the month it's a mess - made worse by...

A basic flaw in table filtering is that if a field has a conditional table relationship the filter can't cope. So on the payment application screen, you can't actually just select a customer or vendor. In fact the list defaults to the a list of general ledger accounts - which is frankly - useless - and not just here. The solution is so obvious is galling. If a conditional table relationship exists, let us select the type of relationship first and then select from the list. The ability to 'filter on selected row' wouldn't hurt either.

So we have to manually search down the table, find a customer, look at their account no, type in the value into the filter and then sort by posting date and then manually select records. Multiply that by dozens of transactions to reconcile and you can see why the act of actually manually importing a file isn't the big issue for us.

The sad thing is that all the data exists to make this amazing - yet there is no improvement release to release and that has kind of shocked me.

Bank Account Reconciliation

The bank account reconciliation has improved leaps and bounds, however there are a couple of aspects that seem counter intuitive.

1) Why can't you create a payment reconciliation journal from a specific line in the bank statement. Rather than having to create a payment journal and manually figure out an assignment of a payment. The use of this system works wonderfully for processing charge cards / credit cards but is woeful if you want to use bank reconciliation without first using the payment reconciliation journal. Both the lack of functionality from the payment reconciliation journal and the completely different interfaces for applying payments are jarring.

2) The running balance from an imported statement should be able to be used (just like the latest date) to hopefully suggest a statement ending balance. It should be relatively trivial to figure out if a file is in ascending/descending order based on dates and takes the bottom or top row running balance - thereby avoiding the need to reference an underlying file or look online for that value.

3) The is a similar issue elsewhere in the application. The lack of horizontal tables (and reliance on document style fast tabs) means that the clumsy show all / show nonmatched is buried in the menu. I hope that the team understanding you are dramatically impacting your options for providing an improved user experience. Most users would find it much more logical to have a unmatched (to be processed) tab and a matched for review tab that they can switch between. That gives a feeling of progress - beyond the green as matched items disappear from the first tab. It also means that the system hopefully would be automatically processing and placing everything in match-to-be reviewed tab by default. A count on each of those tabs would then improve the situation.

In Summary

The system does the job but would have to be amongst the worst, most confusing, unintelligent and stubbornly limiting payment and bank reconciliation systems I've ever used. I use business central despite it, not because of it.

I'm not suggesting you do a continuous reconciliation system like xero (which has its merits) but would be disruptive. However, it feels before you go about fully integrating to banks for continuous statements - a lot of work needs to be done to make payment and bank reconciliations more efficient, less error prone and give the user a feeling of delight for job well done.

I feel that whilst the functional team could be actually watching customers try to use the system more, some of the issues are to do with a lack of continued innovation and change in user interface components. You are artificially constraining yourselves with the old fast-tab / grid / menu paradigms - god knows I'm sure I'm not the only one noting this down.

I'm not even jumping into the long list of competitors features that are appearing where they have conquered the basics above.