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Reconcile Bank Account

Purpose

Everytime you get a Bank Statement you would like to check your own values for the period in your Bank Account.

Procedure

  1. Select the account you want to reconcile.
  2. Get your bank statement (from the bank)
  3. The first time you reconcile you will need to enter a reconcile date and a start balance... Or 0 for the start balance if it is actually a new account.
  4. Enter the end balance from the statement
  5. Check entries that match the entries from your bank statement
  6. If all entries match, Difference should be 0. If it is, you are done and you have reconciled your account for the period. If you have some transactions unchecked, they will wait for next bank statement to be reconciled. If you have some transactions on bank statement but absent in system, go to the Bank Payments/Deposits and enter missing transactions, then repeat step 5.
  7. All checked items are recorded as reconciled in the bank_trans table and the last ending balance and reconciled date is recorded for that account in the bank_accounts table.
  8. The next time you reconcile against a bank statement, the ending balance from the last reconciliation is automatically used as the starting balance for this reconciliation. You enter the ending balance for this reconciliation and repeat steps 5-7
  9. If you want for some reason to find transactions reconciled with bank statement on given date select the document date with the selector. If you have a lot of bank statements entered you can skip the bank statement selector and enter date of bank statement in Reconcile Date directly. If there is no bank statement reconciled on given date the selector will display New.

Tips and Tricks

  1. To delete existing reconciliation date, un-tick every bank entry that had been ticked before. When every ticked entry have been un-ticked, the system will automatically delete the reconciliation date.
  2. Beginning balance is calculated on the fly as a sum of all reconciled transactions with older date (see get_max_reconciled()).
  3. Select reconciliation date with Bank Statement selector, or add new one in Reconcile Date field. Then after first reconciled payment the new date appears in Bank Statement selector.
  4. The default selected period is currently 1 month before current date.
  5. If you want to tick most or all of the entries on the page, it is faster to click the Reconcile All button on the bottom of the page, and then untick the unneeded entries. This is especially helpful for automatically generated or imported transactions.

Outline for Bank Reconciliation Summary Report

We need a bank reconcliation if we take our trial balance to an external accountant to prepare our books and tax returns at year end as he will want to see a bank reconciliation report to demonstrate that all the data is included.

An outline of the currently missing Bank Reconciliation Summary Report would be something like:

1. Bank statement closing balance: $xxx

Add: Unpresented Payments:

  • Payment 1 $xxx
  • Payment 2 $xxx

...

  • Payment n $xxx

2. Total Unpresented Payments: $xxx

Less: Unpresented Deposits:

  • Deposit 1 $xxx
  • Deposit 2 $xxx

...

  • Deposit n $xxx

3. Total Unpresented Deposits: $xxx

4. Calculated Reconciled Balance (1+2-3): $yyy

5. Cashbook Computer Balance: $yyy

6. Difference (4-5): $0.00