Manual (cash) account balance fixes, account form balance display adjusted

Manual (cash) account balance fixes, account form balance display adjusted
Blog post · 25 Feb, 2012

Updates have just been deployed which fix an issue with balance calculations for Transaction Accounts, with symptoms being particularly prevalent with newer accounts with few transactions. The issue was also more apparent when transactions were added to the account manually.

The issue revolved around the logic used when calculating balances from a balance reset or for the first few transactions being entered, with the synchronization between the starting balance entered against the Transaction Account failing.

This has now been resolved, and balances are correct when first creating a new Transaction Account, and also when resetting the balance for an existing one.

Transaction Account Edit Form changes

There have also been changes to the Edit form for accounts as well (My Accounts widget > Manage > Edit) which removes some of the simplification we were doing in the balance area. We now display the raw starting balance and starting balance date that has been set against an account, whereas previously we inserted the calculated current balance and balance date into the form.

While we endeavour to hide complexity such as “starting balance” etc moving forward, at the moment we believe it is important to give our users fine-grained controls and an understanding of how everything works, until we develop user interface elements that progressively introduce complexity. What we found is that introducing a half-way solution - over-writing form values - results in a jarring experience.

In this case, automatically inserting the calculated closing balance meant that resetting the starting balance in the Account form appears to “not stick” - because the calculated current values would be re-inserted again after saving the account.

Now we display the calculated balance explicitly below the raw starting balance fields, for reference. Users are able to change starting balance and starting balance date however required, and all transaction balances will be recalculated based on entered the entered values.