Chart Of Accounts Locking - nuance needed
under review
hector
The new locking mechanism in chart of accounts is awesome. But it’s missing some new ones, first of all the ability to lock source account from being used versus line item or destination account from being used. For example, locking a bank account from being used as a category is a whole different context from using it in the source level of an expense check for the faucet transaction.
Also, I would love to lock the accounts for all of the users, except me, it’s a pain in the butt for me to lock the accounts, but also lock myself out. It’s a big challenge, as an accountant. I’m the one that knows how to use it I’m OK with using it. It’s just locking everybody else out of it.
Filtering accounts by locked versus unlocked, would be used super useful, also being able to batch unlock would also be super used.
I did a video explaining my logic.
E
Eric Foster
Thanks hector, glad to hear you're liking the new COA Locking feature and seeing a lot of value already!
Yes, this is a first pass, and when we did early accountant testing, many of them asked the same question you did: if I lock an account, does it only affect my clients, or does it lock me out too? We would definitely like to support more granular control on that in the future.
We can also look into locking only at the line level or header level on transactions, and adding a locked/unlocked filter in the COA list.
By the way, while we were building the COA Locking feature we also added two other features you may not know about, both related to bank feeds. First, we stop predicting to locked accounts. We added this into our API, not just the dropdown: if you lock an account, then no future transaction imported from bank feeds will get predicted to it. Second, if you have an existing bank rule and then lock the account on the rule, we will stop the rule. Even if the rule does other things (add payee, class, etc.), we'll stop the entire rule from running and display a message on the Rules page saying the rule can't run because it uses a locked account. We added this based on accountant feedback.
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under review