Focused Period

An accountant works a month, a quarter or a year at a time. The focus switch in the sidebar sets that period once, and the main work pages follow it instead of each keeping its own date filter.

It is accountant-side only, and it is yours: nothing you set here changes what a colleague sees.

Turning it on

The switch sits in the left sidebar, just under Home. When no period is set it reads No period over Select period - the words "Focused period" only appear once you open it, as the panel's title.

Click it, pick a Month, a Quarter or a Year, and the period applies at once and the panel closes. The switch row then names the period and reports what it is doing on the page you are on.

Turning it off

Open the panel and click Turn focus off, at the top right of the panel header, beside the close button.

One thing to expect: the page you are standing on stays on that period. Switching focus off stops it driving your pages, but it does not rewind the page you are already looking at. The date is simply editable again, and you can change it on the spot. Pages you navigate to afterwards are back to their own filters.

Opening a month in Closing turns focus on

This surprises people, because it happens without asking. Opening a period in Closing sets the focused period to that month, whether or not you had focus on. Move from July to August inside Closing and the focus moves with you.

So if you have never touched the switch, look at July's Closing and then open Invoices, you will find the list narrowed to July with a date control you cannot edit. That is not a fault: it is focus, switched on by Closing. Turn it off in the sidebar panel.

What follows the period

Two entries there are worth reading twice, because the sidebar switch does not tell you about either.

On Matching, the pending queue is never narrowed. The Overview tab follows the period, and on the Matches tab only the approved section does. The pending suggestion queue at the top of the page is deliberately never filtered: it is your action queue, and a July invoice may legitimately settle against an August payment. So the count at the top does not shrink when you focus a month. The one exception is the Open link of the Closing check No pending match suggestions: it narrows the pending list to that month's suggestions, says so in a label above the list, and Clear filter brings the full list back.

Two of the four export pages ignore the period entirely. The Ledger and the RLB export follow it. HessynKettős and Business Central each keep their own date control, which starts at all time - yet the switch still says Filtering this page while you are on them. Set the range on the page itself there, and do not trust the switch.

On Invoices and Bank transactions the page title carries the period as well, so a narrowed list never looks like the whole picture. Matching and the export pages have no such title, which is where a narrowed list is easiest to misread.

The date control on a focused page

While focus is on, the date control on Invoices and Bank transactions becomes a label, not a control. It shows the period with a ◆ in front of it, and hovering says "Set in the sidebar: one period for every page".

This is deliberate. A period you could change per page is exactly what lets a list and its export answer the same question differently. The sidebar is the one place it changes.

1. On Invoices, only the right half is a control: it sets the date basis. The period itself is a label - hovering it says where to change it, and clicking does nothing.
2. On Bank transactions nothing in the control is clickable at all, because a bank transaction always uses its booking date.

On Invoices the right-hand half of that control is still live: it sets the date basis (fulfillment, issue date and so on). The period comes from focus; which date it is measured on stays a page choice, and an invoice with no date on the chosen basis falls outside the filter. On Bank transactions nothing in the control is clickable, because a bank transaction always uses its booking date.

What still looks beyond the period

Not the search boxes. A search on a list searches inside the focused period, like every other filter on it.

What genuinely ignores the period is anything whose job is to look further:

• The invoices offered when you match by hand. The candidate list is never date-limited, because the matching invoice is often outside the period.
• The pending suggestion queue on Matching, as above.
• The Ledger's Meaning search, which has no date filtering of its own at all.

Run Matching also ignores the focused period: it has its own range menu, and the period is not one of its options.

The status under the switch

The switch always reports what focus is doing on the page you are looking at.

Take Filtering this page as a claim about the page's main list, not a guarantee about everything on it. On Matching it covers the Overview tab and the approved section. On the Matching Partners tab and on the HessynKettős and Business Central export pages it is simply wrong today.

The panel

Besides the period picker, the panel holds two sections.

This period shows where the month's closing stands, and is the narrowest part of the feature:

• It only works for a focused month. With a quarter or a year focused it reads Not calculated, there is no count, and the row does not jump to that period's Closing.
• It needs the "Close periods" permission. Without it the section is not shown, just as Closing is not in the sidebar.
• The count is of failing blocking checks, not of records: "3 blocking checks" can mean three thousand invoices or one missing setting. It also leaves out advisory checks and the manual checklist, both of which can still stand between you and a close.
• It is always measured on the fulfillment date, whatever basis your lists are set to.

Master data is a grid of shortcuts to the pages that have no period at all.

Where it is kept

The focused period lives in your browser, per person and per workspace. It starts off, it does not follow you to another computer, and if you work on two machines you set it on each.

Three things follow from that:

• On a shared browser profile everyone keeps their own period. Whoever signs in after you starts from their own setting, not yours, and yours is back when you sign in again.
• Client users never have a focused period. A client who signs in on a browser an accountant used before sees their lists with the normal date filters.
• If your browser refuses local storage, as a private window may, the switch will not stay on at all.

Good to know

• Focusing a month does not give you a daily chart. The Matching overview switches to weekly bars for a focused month or quarter, and monthly for a year. That is the same data at a coarser grain, not a missing chart.
• A link you were sent can lose its date. If focus is on, opening a shared link applies your period rather than the link's.
• Type dates and whole periods in a few keystrokes anywhere: see Fast Date Entry.

Related

• Ledger - the export surface that does follow the period
• Invoice Matching - why the pending queue is not narrowed
• Fast Date Entry