One thing we get very often in support is questions regarding the outstanding accounts so I'd like to create one post that goes over everything you need to know as you transition into using the outstanding accounts. Especially for our user that are coming from the older versions that did not use the outstanding accounts. 

What are outstanding accounts?

Outstanding accounts are used when manually registering the payment instead of the actual bank account. 

This allows us to have two distinct phases of reconciliation. Reconciling the payment to the invoice/bill and reconciling the payment to the bank line. So when a payment is made in odoo but not matched the bank statement it is "In Payment" and it is finally paid once its fully reconciled. 

It also ensures we use the bank statement lines as our overall source of truth as these are the only things that make entries on the bank account. 

So the flow would be as follows. A payment is made on a 100$ invoice it clears out receivables for the invoice and puts that in the outstanding account. 

When you create a bank statement it puts the amount in the bank account and uses a suspense account to hold the other half of the transaction. When reconciled the suspense account gets replaced with the other half of the outstanding account. This leaves a zero balance in outstanding and the correct amount in the bank account. 

So in v14 we had set the outstanding accounts on each journal so you would have a different account for each bank account. In v15 we still allow you to set these on the journal (in three dots field expansion) but by default we create one pair seen in default accounts. This is fine as we still track how much is for each bank account individually has outstanding per journal since the payment is made per journal. 

You can easily find what your total is by reconciling your statements input already then adding the outstanding amounts. This just means these payments were made but we haven't uploaded the bank statement yet. 

So from a more technical point of view what the outstanding accounts doing in Reconciliation?

So when you set the outstanding account on the default account or journal level you are basically saying this is the account you need to look in for transactions to reconcile with this bank account.  

One thing I see quite frequently as a support member is people trying to go back to the v13 way of how payments were handled by setting the bank account to the outstanding accounts. on the journal This will only cause more issues and work for you in the long run. 

This type of setup is only acceptable for journals that you will not reconcile with a statement. The most common use for this would be cash accounts. 

Now if you attempt to override the outstanding accounts on bank journals you will run into issues reconciling and with the balance being doubled. Since you don't have a statement for cash it doesn't make sense to need to reconcile. 

If you attempt to do this with the bank account here is what will happen. Since you are saying look in this account for reconciling it will find unreconciled bank statement lines 

You will then run into an error that says something along the lines of you can only reconcile entries with one entry on the bank account as in reality you are looking to reconcile the line with itself or with a payment that has the bank account already in it. This is how it would mess up your totals as well since both the payment and statement create entries on bank account it creates a doubled amount. 

This is commonly found with a an automated reconciliation model as it attempts to reconcile the bank statement line against itself and runs into issues, so any auto validating reconciliation models usually error out trying to reconcile the line against itself. This is why this old set is only able to be done in cash/statement less journals. 

Regards,
Ben