Open Item Matching

A transfer account only behaves correctly if it empties out. Money parks there for a few days — a collective card debit waiting to be split, a payment sitting between two bank accounts, an advance that has not met its invoice yet — and then it leaves again. The balance on such an account says very little on its own. What matters is which postings have found their counterpart and which have not.

Matching answers that. You pick the postings on one account that cancel each other, and they get a single match number (M-14), shown next to every one of them and on the documents they belong to. The account then reads as two populations: matched — done, ignore — and open, which is your to-do list.

Matching posts nothing. The one exception is a difference booking you ask for explicitly, described below.

Not to be confused with two neighbours. Reconciliation ticks a bank account off against the bank statement; the Open Items overview shows unpaid invoices. Matching is for the accounts in between — transfer, clearing, advances, credit cards, VAT, payroll.

Switching it on for an account#

Matching is a per-account setting, like Allow GL. Open System → Chart of Accounts, edit the account, and tick Open item matching. The account list has a Matching column so you can see at a glance which accounts are set up.

Your dataset already has the obvious ones switched on: the transition account bank imports post to, the payment transfer account, the external payment account, and the accrual accrued accounts. Everything else is off until you turn it on.

Two kinds of account are deliberately excluded:

• Debitoren/Kreditoren control accounts. Their open items are invoices, and invoices are tracked as invoices — in the Open Items overview, with the customer, the due date and the payment history attached.
• Bank accounts. They have Reconciliation. Two competing notions of “done” on one account is how people stop trusting both.

Matching entries#

Open the account ledger — click an account number in the Trial Balance, the Balance Sheet or the Income Statement. On an account that is set up for matching, the ledger gains three things:

• a view switch — All, Open, Matched — with the count of each
• a Match no. column showing the group a posting belongs to, or Open
• a checkbox on every open posting

Tick the postings that belong together. A bar appears along the bottom with the number selected, the debit and credit totals, and — the figure that matters — the difference. When it reads 0.00, press Match. The group gets its number and the rows move to Matched.

A few details worth knowing:

• Everything is measured in your base currency. A movement in another currency is one row carrying its value in CHF, with the document amount and the rate beneath it — USD 19'331.85 @ 0.8175 under a figure of 15'803.79. That CHF value is what the account balance is built from and what a match is judged on, so a USD posting and a CHF posting of the same value do cancel each other even though the figures on the documents differ.
• A posting belongs to at most one group. To move it, unmatch first.
• A group can hold more than two postings — one collective debit against five splits is one group.

When the amounts do not agree#

Press Match on a selection that does not close and the difference dialog opens: it names the amount and asks where to book it. The accounts you use most are offered as one-click choices — the exchange-difference account, the cash-discount account, the rounding account, as configured in your dataset — and any other account can be picked from the list. Set the date and a description, then Book and match.

That posts one balanced journal entry for the difference and includes it in the group, so the three lines (both sides plus the difference) close to zero. The entry appears in the ledger like any other, carrying the same match number.

If the date falls in a closed period the booking is refused — matching an old group is always allowed, but posting into a closed period is not.

Undoing a match#

Open the group — click its number anywhere it appears — and the toolbar becomes that group’s context: the number, how many entries it holds, and Unmatch. The entries become open items again.

If the group posted a difference booking, the dialog asks what should happen to it. Deleting it is offered only while its period is open; otherwise it stays and you reverse it deliberately.

Matches made for you#

Where neoo posts both sides of a transfer-account movement itself, it links them without being asked. Those groups are marked matched automatically and behave like any other — you can unmatch them.

• Cross-currency bank settlements. When a payment in a third currency is settled through the transition account (see Bank Matching), the holding entry and the payment posted from it are matched to each other.
• Credit notes applied to an invoice. Both legs run through the payment transfer account and cancel exactly, so they are matched as they are posted.

Undoing the bank match removes the group it created, and any other match whose postings it dismantles — see the next section. Matches on postings the undo does not touch are left alone.

When a matched transaction is edited#

Postings are not frozen because they are matched — and a match never keeps claiming that an account is settled once that stopped being true. If a group stops balancing, the match is removed and its postings become open items again. That happens the moment the change is saved, whichever screen it came from:

• an amount changed on a matched posting
• a matched posting moved to a different account, or its line removed
• the transaction deleted altogether — the rest of its group opens up with it

Correcting a matched entry therefore costs you the match, and you match it again once the figures are right. Re-saving a transaction without touching the amounts — a corrected description, a different date — keeps its match.

The point of the rule is that the Open list is always the truth: anything still shown as matched really does cancel out.

Where a match shows up#

• On the document. An AR/AP transaction, an invoice or a journal entry that takes part in a group carries a banner at the top: Matched as M-14 on account 1090, with a link that opens the group.
• In the account ledger. The Match no. column, and the view switch.
• In the Trial Balance. Accounts that take part in matching get an Open column showing the unmatched part of the balance. Clicking it opens the ledger on exactly those postings — the month-end check of “what is still sitting on the transfer accounts”, in the report you already have open.

Permissions#

Seeing the match state rides along with the trial balance permission: anyone who can read the account ledger sees the match numbers and can open a match, but without the matching permission there are no checkboxes and no Unmatch — the page is read-only on that point. Matching and unmatching are granted on a role like any other, see Users & Roles.

Links follow the same rule. The banner on a document only offers View match to someone who may open the account ledger, and in the ledger a reference is only a link when the reader may open that document — otherwise it stays plain text instead of leading to a refusal.