Matching Transactions and what the Green Circle Icon does

When you manually enter a transaction in a linked account register, it originally appears as a Green Circle.  It's green because it's entered by you, not any of the categorization engines. Plus it's the only icon that's an open circle since it's waiting for a transaction to clear the bank.  I.e. it's probably a check.

Although you could wait for transactions to clear the bank before they're recorded, you might also want to know the actual spendable balance in your bank account by entering your uncleared transactions.  This also provides payee and expense detail that may not be available when we get check data, since most checks are not digitized (yet) Cheqbook doesn't get the essential vendor name that allows us to auto-categorize it for you.

When the check does clear, Cheqbook tries to automatically match transactions from the bank to the checks you've entered - whether they come from Bill Pay (AP) or are entered directly in the register.  When they do match that green circle automatically becomes a green checkmark, you don't have to do anything in most cases!

If for some reason they don't match automatically, you can manually match them to remove duplicates.

• In the account's register find the transaction with a green circle (the uncleared one).  
• Click the "more" button found next to the transaction's score. The split window will open with the bank info and additional options.
• In the split window, click the blue button labelled "More options" and select "Match."
• Cheqbook will search for unmatched bank transactions, going back as far as 120 days, with the same amount as the selected transaction.
• Select the the correct transaction from the list and click "Save."
• The transactions should now be matched / merged together. You can also "Unmatch" the transactions (if necessary) following the same steps.

The bank transaction will be removed and it's information copied over to your manual transaction. If you had previously categorized the bank transaction, it will be replaced with the vendor and category from the green circle transaction.

IMPORTANT:  an item will not match up if the amounts are not exactly the same.  Change the manually entered transaction to equal the bank transaction, even if the bank transaction cleared for the wrong amount (which can happen).  

Missing Transactions and Changing to a Green Checkmark

Because the system does not let you reconcile green circles (because they're expecting a match) if for some reason you have to enter a missing transaction you ALSO need to change it to a green checkmark.  This tells the system that a match is no longer expected to be downloaded and allows that transaction to be reconciled.  See the bank reconciliation FAQ for more details.

To do this is very easy: just click on the green circle next to the transaction in question, and accept the warning to convert it to a green checkmark.  Then you're good to go!