Friday 26 August 2016

Bank Recon 4.9 is available

Bank Recon 4.9.1082.3412 is available for download from the Twenty57 website. Thank you to Shivkant and Shaun for the development work.



New Bank Statements

- SAP
- FlexCube
- Montran

For more information on these formats, contact the Digiata office for assistance.

Performance

Unreconcile performance improvements have been made to support unreconciling a larger number of transactions. This will be most noticeable when unreconciling a recon involving many transferred transactions from different source accounts.

The account save performance has been improved and will be more noticeable in domains with a large number of GL accounts.

Manual Recon transaction selection performance has been improved. This mainly affected IE 8 users.

GL Account usability

When an account has many linked GL accounts, asides from being difficult to locate GL accounts, the application may become slow or even exceed the limitations of the web server as specified in the web.config file (maxRequestLength).

The GL Account list includes a search box with autocomplete:


In the case that the number of GL accounts for the domain is larger than the web.config setting "bankrecon.glaccount.dropdownlimit", the Account editor will show an search control from which GL accounts may be added to the list:



The selected GL accounts may be associated with the account be unchecking the "ALL" checkbox. In this case, only the GL accounts displayed are are associated with the account.


The selected GL accounts may be disassociated with the account by checking the "ALL" checkbox. In this case, all GL accounts are associated with the account except for the selection.


Fixes    


  • The MT940 / MT950 parsers now compare statement numbers correctly when importing a batch of statements with alternate formats of the Statement number tag (:28C)
    • Statement number only:



    • Statement number and sequence number:



  • The IE status bar dependency has been removed. The text previously shown on the status bar is now shown as HTML.




    • This avoids having to allow javascript to update the status bar in IE (as well as display it in the first place).
    • The control totals are now available to Chrome users. (There is no status bar in Chrome)
    • This affects the Manual Recon screen, Cashbook/Bank transaction screens and Transfer Cashbook transactions screen.

 

  • The Manual Recon suggest undo command no longer times out


  • Export to excel bug with control characters
    • Excel files underlying structure is xml and so invalid xml characters are converted to blanks prior to creating the export


  • The Cashbook transaction allocation editor "Save & Reconcile" double-click bug has been fixed.
    • The button will no longer submit multiple requests when double-clicked (It will disable after the first click and enable after)


  • The Report viewer control Oracle parameter bug has been fixed


Structure changes

The ReconCancelBankDetailsTransaction table has been removed. This table was previously used for unreconciling a recon linking Bank transactions directly to Helper Bank transactions.

Direct Bank transaction to Helper bank transaction recons were removed in 2014.


Roadmap

In the immediate future, we will be looking at introducing the Helper data into the front-end. In particular, the Recon rule test functions and recon viewer will display any matched Helper data for verification purposes. The Manual recon screen will be extended to utilise the Helper data for matching in a non-obtrusive fashion.

Friday 1 July 2016

Bank Recon 4.8 has been updated

An issue was found with the Easy Recon rule batch processing mode and the changes have been reverted. We will add batch processing for the Easy rules in an upcoming major version. The updated version (4.8.1068.3360) is available on the Twenty57 website.

Thursday 30 June 2016

Bank Recon 4.8 is available

Bank Recon 4.8.1067.3358 is available for download from the Twenty57 website. Thank you to Shivkant for the development work.

Accounting Periods

The Accounting Period list screen has been updated to allow multiple consecutive accounting periods to be closed.



Each period up to and including the selected period will be closed consecutively.
  
Compatibility Headers

Compatibility headers have been added for users of Internet explorer who use a default document mode prior to IE9. The header will ensure that pages render using IE9 document mode.
  
GenericCSV parser

The Generic CSV parser now supports both of ‘dd/MM/yyyy’ and ‘dd-MM-yyyy’ as date formats. The GenericCSV statement number validation bug has been resolved. The statement number is no longer validated.
  
Unreconciled table concurrency improvements

Unreconciled table maintenance concurrency has been improved. The AutoRecon and Cashbook import processes will no longer fail when the unreconciled table maintenance process fails, but the process will end in a warning.
  
Helper Data matching (Bank <-> ReconHelperBankTransaction match)

This fix affects Recon rules using Helper data with the the option to create journal entries for missing Cashbook transactions selected. Previously, at least one Cashbook transaction would need to match to a ReconHelperCashbookTransaction for the match to succeed.
This is because the underlying ReconHelper set was determined by the Cashbook <-> ReconHelperCashbook match.
Now, the ReconHelper set can be determined by the Bank <-> ReconHelperBankTransaction alone and no Cashbook transactions need to match for journal entries to be created using the linked ReconHelperCashbook transactions.



Recon failure error messages (One of the Recons does not balance)

After a reconciliation fails due to an imbalance between the cashbook and bank when using Helper Data, it has frequently been due to one or more cashbook transactions matching to more than one ReconHelperCashbook transaction. In this case, Bank Recon will show the first 10 duplicates, so that they can be excluded from the match or used to update the Recon rule appropriately.
Easy Recon rule performance

The Easy recon rule editor now generates rules using Batch processing by default. This results in performance improvements in the case that grouping is used and the rule returns many groups.
Recon viewer

The Recon viewer screen has been updated to account for a large number of transferred transactions. When Reconciliations are run across accounts and a large number of transactions are transferred, displaying them all on one screen may result in timeouts,
server errors (maxRequestLength exceeded) or generally poor performance.

We have added paging on the ReconViewer to handle this case.



The page size is a web config application setting, 
<configuration>
...
<appSettings>
...
<add key="bankrecon.reconviewer.pagesize" value="10"/>
...
</appSettings>
...
</configuration>

Increasing the value will affect performance and may require the maximum request length to be increased when the value is large. The default value is 10 items.

Services User

A new user type has been added. Existing users who login to the front-end are known as end-users. The new user type is a service user. Service users cannot login to the front-end. Service users must have a password set, as they are used for the webservice integration. The Service user details are not updated by Active Directory.

Manual Recon balancing entries

There is a new web configuration setting:
        <configuration>
...
<appSettings>
...
<add key="bankrecon.glaccount.dropdownlimit" value="1000"/>
...
</appSettings>
...
</configuration>

The setting affects the cashbook transaction allocation editor when creating a balancing entry. When an account is linked to more GL accounts than specified by the value, the GLAccount dropdown becomes an autocompleting textbox.




The default value is 1000. Setting the value to 0 will always use the autocomplete textbox. Setting the value to a very large number will always use the dropdown.


Friday 20 May 2016

Bank Recon 4.7 is available

Bank Recon 4.7.1059.3321 is available for download from the Twenty57 website. Thank you to Shivkant for the development work.

New Features

  • Bank Recon now supports Chrome Browser
  • MT940 parser now imports a statement date using the last intermediate (62M) or final (62F) closing balance of the SWIFT message
  • SWIFTMT940/SWIFTMT950 parsers both populate Reference1 with the TransactionTypeIdentifier field and Reference2 with the AccountOwnerReference field


Fixes




  • Recon rule preview now works correctly when using the Batch processing feature
  • The Recon rule description length has been increased to 300
  • The AutoRecon Batch processing mode now processes all matches of a batch instead of skipping the last one in the batch

Improvements

  • Login page enhancements + autofocus on the username textbox
  • Display issue affecting the Bank Keys view from the Recon rule test feature has been resolved
  • The AutoRecon Batch processing mode no longer requires GetKeys commands for the left/right datasets

Performance

  • The Batch size used for the AutoRecon batch processing mode is now configurable (default: 1000)

Wednesday 30 March 2016

Bank Recon 4.6 is available

Bank Recon 4.6.1050.3285 is available for download from the Twenty57 website. Thank you to Shivkant for the development work.

New Features

  • There is a new user right applicable to the creation of balancing entries for manual reconciliations:


  • When the setting is off, then any balancing entry created may only be associated to a single GL account:



Fixes

  • The Manual Recon group detail view bug has been fixed. Selecting "Group By" and manually deselecting columns no longer shows an error when viewing the underlying transactions. Using the "Clear all" function to achieve the same result works as usual
  • The Manual Recon dynamic view filter option bug involving the @Date parameter has been fixed
    • Only the equality / inequality operators are supported at this time
  • AutoRecons configured to run across accounts which also use Helper transactions now work correctly
    • This involves transferring the original cashbook transactions into the target account and creating any missing cashbook transactions in the target account using the helper transactions
  • On the Easy Recon rule screen, the "Other Match" editor now works correctly when using the Reference1 field and any of the Reference10-Reference19 fields
  • The Manual Recon profile list now displays correctly on IE9
  • SWIFT MT950 bank statements with country codes matching Zimbabwe (ZW) / Malawi (MW) now import correctly

Improvements

  • Open Bank / Cashbook batches can be reordered using the DateCreated column to show earliest / latest entry first

  • Export to Excel functionality has been added to the following screens:
    • Cashbook allocations
    • Grouped Cashbook transactions (Manual Recon)
    • Grouped Bank transactions (Manual Recon)
Performance
  • Auto Reconciliation performance improvements have been made for Reconciliations performed across accounts involving transaction transfers.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Bank Recon 4.5.1039.3252 is available

Bank Recon 4.5.1039.3252 is available for download from the Twenty57 website. A big thank you to Ashish, Jai and Shivkant for the development work.


Features
  • Import definitions
    • BankRecon can now import transactions from Oracle stored procedures
      • Entering the name of a configured stored procedure will return a parameter list
      • One of the parameters must be selected as the Key value as per regular imports
  • Tagging across accounts
    • Tagging across accounts is now supported to complement searching across accounts
    • In the case that transactions have been tagged from multiple accounts, the account name is added to transaction grid to disambiguate the source
    • Tagged cashbook and bank transactions will open in the account in which they were tagged
  • Public Recon profiles
    • Manual recon profiles can be published to all users on the same account as a public profile
    • Public profiles will appear in other users' Current Profile dropdowns who have access to the same account
    • Any profile can be shown in / hidden from the 'Current Profile' list using the 'Manage Profiles' screen
    • Only the creator of a public profile may edit/delete that profile
  • Export to excel
    • Cashbook and Bank transaction exports now produce Excel (xlsx) files in addition to csv files
    • Reconciliations can now be exported in a single Excel workbook with 3 sheets:
      • Details: Shows the Reconciliation details (ID, Account, Accounting Period, User, Description)
      • Cashbook: Contains the reconciled cashbook transactions
      • Bank: Contains the reconciled bank transactions
      • When exporting reconciliations as a csv file, the 3 datasets are zipped into a single archive
  • Accounting Periods
    • There is a new setting on the Account maintenance screen to allow/deny closing an accounting period prior to the period's end date
  • Adjust Opening Balance
    • Accounting Period opening and closing balances for the Cashbook and Bank are shown
    • A help dialog has been added to explain the functionality
    • The earliest available Bank opening balance is displayed to illustrate the procedure and updating the bank opening balance now correctly propagates to all subsequent periods
Fixes
  • Manual Recon screen
    • When grouping bank transactions, the filter is now applied to the underlying transactions and not the resulting group
  • Reports
    • Parameterless reports now display correctly in the browser
  • Generic CSV importer
    • The Generic CSV importer no longer attempts to validate the statement number when selected as part of a multiple file import since it does not use the statement number
    • Errors returned by the parser include the transaction number relative to the uploaded file and useful information on how to resolve any errors
Performance

  • Classic Recon rules
    • The classic Recon rule editor now supports a batch processing mode, which improves performance by executing the GetKeysCommands for a batch of matches instead of one-by-one processing
    • An example is available in the application to illustrate the procedure and changes required to the Recon rule
  • Auto Recon rule performance logging
    • In Site Configuration, there is a new setting, "AutoRule Log Enabled"
    • When checked, the consolidated duration of the left and right side queries of Recon rules are logged in the 'ReconRuleAuditLog' table, so that any poorly performing queries can be identified