I believe that you think it's more cumbersome in Odoo because [1] you are not comparing the whole process with the case of a discrepancy and [2] you are not aware of the black-lines technique.
[1] You describe the QB-way to be fast. It's true until your ending balance doesn't match and until you need to troubleshoot where the discrepancy comes from. And you are going to lose all the time you saved beforehand on this step because the moment you have the slightest discrepancy you will have to analyze everything line by line anyway.
[2] Let's look at both processes, including when there is a discrepancy.
Process in QB:
- Create and validate invoices during the month
- Register payments on those invoices during the month
- At the end of the month, do the "starting balance, ending balance" step you mentioned
- If it doesn't match, spend your month end to frantically troubleshoot what you forgot to enter in QB, line by line... And you will have to leave your reconciliation window to create/reconcile missing payments, etc.
Process in Odoo - black line technique (there are other techniques and your methods of payments may require alternate approaches):
- Create and validate invoices during the month
- Import your bank statements during the month (automatic or manual)
- Reconcile bank statement lines with open invoices (ie. black lines) during the month; this will automatically register a payment and reconcile the invoice with the payment and with the statement line, all in one click.
- At the end of the month, inspect you did everything correctly with the reconciliation report (ie. the 'difference' link on your dashboard).
As you can see, in Odoo, you replace the recording of payments with the reconciliation of a statement line. Those 2 operations are completely similar in workload and time. But with Odoo, if you have a discrepancy it will tell you exactly what journal item it is without troubleshooting/analysis (QB won't because it only goes by starting and ending balance).
Finally, if you really really want to do the QB-way that you described in Odoo (and I don't recommend this), you can create one bank statement at the end of the month with only 1 statement line corresponding to the difference between the starting and ending balance. You then click the Reconcile button and "check off" each transaction that took place during that time. You should end up with the same amount. If you have a discrepancy, you will have to troubleshoot and dive in the nitty gritty details of your journal entries, just like in QB. And doing this takes longer than the black-lines technique.
Bonus: more on statement reconciliation:
https://youtu.be/oOwUj1MVGKc?t=16613 (it's on Odoo 10 but the fundamentals are still true).
Hi Marisa,
This looks very promising. I don't see it in the 3rd party app downloads available through Odoo's site. So I assume you had to go direct to them and buy this feature? I'm very interested in learning more. thanks! Sarah