Setting up suspense
Two settings decide what happens to money you cannot yet attribute: the purposes you hold it under, and, for each bank account, whether unmatched lines park automatically.
Purposes
A purpose says what unallocated money is being held for, which ledger accounts it books through, and how long it may sit before somebody is asked to look at it.
Open Settings and select Suspense Purposes.
Each purpose carries:
- Label — what a clerk sees on the worklist.
- Posting group — the ledger accounts this purpose’s money books through. A purpose whose posting group has no rule for the transaction type refuses the park outright, rather than holding money the general ledger never sees.
- Write-off transaction type — how money written off this purpose is posted.
- Default inbound transaction type — what a receipt becomes when it reaches a destination account whose type marks no default of its own.
- Auto-allocate settings — the confidence the machine must reach before it places money unattended, and the amount above which it never does.
- Age bands — the ages at which somebody is asked to look.
Exactly one purpose receives money arriving on a bank account no purpose claims. Setting that flag on one purpose clears it from the others.
The key cannot be changed. It derives the identifier every suspense account, open item and case already stores, so renaming it would strand that money under an identifier nothing points at. To retire a purpose, empty it and stop feeding it.
Automatic parking
Whether unmatched lines park is a decision per bank account, because a settlement receipts account and a fees account want different answers.
Open the external account and select Automatic parking.
| Setting | What happens to a line matching could not place |
|---|---|
| Stay unmatched until a clerk parks them | Nothing. The line waits on the reconciliation screen. |
| Park after a grace period | It parks once it is older than the number of days you set. |
| Park the day it arrives | It parks on the night of the import. |
Park lines valued on or after is the date parking starts applying. Set it when you switch a live account on. Without it, switching an account that has years of unmatched history sweeps all of it into suspense on the first night, and it arrives already past every age band.
What a refusal does
Money never leaves one place without arriving in another. If a park or an allocation is refused — a purpose with no ledger mapping, a receiving account whose type cannot take the receipt — the money stays where it was and the line goes back to unmatched. If the refusal only becomes apparent after the money has moved, it is returned automatically, and the return appears on the receipt’s journey as a reversal.
A tenant that has not licensed suspense parks nothing. Unmatched lines simply stay unmatched, and nothing is queued for an operator to clear.