Jay Armstrong's dashboard

I wanted to delete transactions because I wanted an up-to-date balance in freeagent. The OFX downloads lag at least a couple of days behind reality (while transactions are "pending", they don't show up in the OFX but the money has been pulled from my account) and of course checks I send could get cashed at any point in the future. Additionally, as mentioned above, I was entering a lot of details and such into my manual transactions that I would then have to recreate upon downloading the same transactions from the bank.

What I need is a register that lets me quickly enter & modify transactions for any date so that I can maintain an accurate and current view of my accounts. As far as reconciling manual transactions with the OFX, that ought to be handled by a reconciling function and be separate from the "register". Anyway, the new Bills function is a great step in the right direction but last I checked, if I manually enter debits or credits for a future date, they are seen as additional transactions when uploading a statement. – Jay Armstrong, on October 12, 2008 20:19

I added some 2006-2007 transactions initially to test out freeagent, but now need to delete them to balance my P&L for that year as I haven't inputted every transaction or invoice.

I have this problem too. I uploaded a statement with some dates overlapping with a previous upload, and the system did not recognise a duplicate. I know you would like a perfect system, but we need the ability to reverse the effect of imperfections till you get there!

Hi Jay

We have been discussing some improvements to the upload and explain process which we hope to work on in the near future. We're aware that there are some situations which our auto-guess system is a little too eager, and where customers would like a bit more control.

I'm still not quite sure why you would need to delete uploaded transactions though?

I also need the option to delete uploaded transactions. I understand 'the truth' concept but I'm *generally* smarter than the uploads or have already filled in the details, category, etc. Not to mention, if the transaction includes multiple checks or an order for widgets that needs to be rebilled to multiple projects, it's going to take even more time.

Some sort of matching -- even just a manual option -- is sorely needed.

@Mike
Thanks again. I'll keep it simple like that.

@Ed
I like your general aim of keeping it fast and intuitive. :)

Thanks loads for these ideas.

It's tricky to keep everyone happy, but I think if we make it dead simple to:

* create clients and default projects on the fly (so it can all be done from the Add an Invoice form, for example, by just typing the bare minimum of info for each) and also

* make it one-click to switch between project states

then we are most of the way there. The organisation and display of clients and projects is critical so that we can make it look nearly like there's no intervening project in some cases.

We are continuing to develop our ideas in these areas, so keep the suggestions coming and when we have an improved approach to release your feedback will be crucial.

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the good comments. I'll just add my 2p-worth.

I have some clients with ongoing (i.e. never-ending projects), which is basically IT Support and software development as you seem to also have :) But on the subject of infrequent clients is it not just easy enough to close the project (set project status to completed), which effectively moves the project out of sight so it doesn't clutter your active projects view?

I had an idea about creating a single use "client" then a single use "project" just for the purposes of logging invoices, but this would mess up the accounting somewhat.

I don't think it's a major deal to have to create projects for each client, as long as the project can be marked completed and hence removed from immediate view - since there's going to be quite a pile of them. It would be nice to have a standalone invoice class which doesn't appear to rely on the client/project/invoice schema, but I'm not sure if this would break the rules.

The alternative that springs to mind is to use the API to write your own front end to these rules which allows exactly this type of behaviour; this is what I'm currently doing :)

Cheers,

Mike

Thank you both for the input. I'll just keep at it and see if I come up with any other ideas to share. First thought: it could be interesting to create a different class of client that is for one-time billing and allows timeslips to be created without any projects or tasks. Second thought: projects that can be shared among clients. This would be useful in other scenarios besides mine.

What do you think of the following setup?
On-going clients:
never-ending projects (Smith IT Support)
never-ending tasks (Smith IT Support)
dated timeslips
invoices insert any unbilled timeslips, so there's no real need for different tasks & projects

Infrequent clients:
single-use projects
single-use tasks
dated timeslips (mostly for tracking hours worked/billed in a week/month ... otherwise I would just create Invoice items with no timeslips)

Hmm, now maybe I should just create the invoice directly for infrequent clients. I could still look at my invoice totals to see how I did for the week, no?

Hi Ed,

@Ed; One of the reasons why I wanted to get a grip on the API as early as possible was to address this issue. We sell mostly software products, but have a regular stream of customers for whom we provide software services. For software services, FreeAgent works brilliantly. However for selling products (or doing any one-time billing), we have a more work to do as this involves the creation of a client, then a project, then an invoice. And the project will only ever be a weak-class which sits as an intermediary between the client and the invoice, but for our business the invoice and the project are identical such that the project is "completed" as soon as the invoice is paid.

@Jay; You'll love FreeAgent. Depending on how many products you sell you might have a mountain of unnecessary projects for now, but for everything else FreeAgent saves so much time that it's not really a net burden to have to create projects for each customer that you need to invoice. Just remember to mark each project as "Completed" so that it doesn't clutter up your views :P

Hope this helps,

Mike

Jay,

Last week we had a big brainstorm here at FreeAgent Central about how we can make this whole Client > Project > Task > Timeslip thing easier.

I'm not sure we're ever going to manage directly allocating tasks to Clients with no Project, but we're certainly going to make it easier to create a simple project for a client while you're adding a Timeslip or Invoice, in the same way as you can create Tasks as you go. This will extend to other areas, so hopefully you should never need to 'go back and create a new client/project/task/whatever'.

We're also going to reorganize Clients and Projects so the distinction between Active and Completed will not be the only way of listing things. That should help too.