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Is Your Bank Reconciliation out of Balance?

A straight forward bank reconciliation relies on accurate data entry. Bank reconciliations should be completed on a regular basis. How often is regular? Well that really depends on the volume of data. Regular for some business may be daily, whilst for most it will be monthly. Checking your business’ bank statement regularly and keeping data entry up to date is a key to making bank reconciliation easy. We recommend only finalising your bank reconciliations at the end of each month so that your reports are for a full month – but that does not mean that you can’t ensure that your records are up to date on a daily or weekly basis by simply checking your bank balance and your accounting software balance regularly. If your balance does not match, we recommend the following:

1. Work out the amount it is out by
2. Check uncleared payments/receipts
3. Back track to the point in which the bank is in balance
4. Move forward until you locate the out of balance figure

Bookkeeping often relies on a detective element – always work backwards to the point in which things are correct. Fix moving forward until you are working up to current.

Bank Reconciliations With Bank Feeds?

Bank Feeds add an additional element of complexity when trying to work out why your software does not balance with your bank statement. Areas to check:

1. Sales Invoices or Supplier Bills marked as paid but not in the period you are reconciling
2. Spend/Receive Money transaction coded from the bank feed and not matched off with bank transaction
3. Spend/Receive Money transactions entered and reconciled but not leaving the bank account in the period you are reconciling
4. Missing Bank transactions
5. Duplicated Bank transactions
6. Forced reconciled items

Reason’s can vary between software – if you need assistance to trouble shoot.
Call in The BookSitters