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BANK RECONCILIATION
Version 2024.02
You’ll often enter expenses in your journal as you write a check or enter revenue when filling out a deposit slip. This means that your journal balance and your bank balance will often not be the same. Reconciling doesn’t fix this discrepancy, but it allows you to see if your numbers match your bank’s numbers, even when they don’t.
You can reconcile whenever you want, and as often as you want if you have online access to your bank accounts. You should try to reconcile at least once per month. Any longer than a month and you’re making it harder to find errors, and probably not saving yourself much time in the long run.
Open your bank statement or online account. Check to see if any transactions with a “Pending” status in your journal have now posted to your bank. If they have, update their statuses in your journal.
Check to see if any transactions have posted to your bank that aren’t in your journal, such as a utility bill on auto-pay. Add any to your journal with a status of “Posted”:
Then, go to the Reconciliation sheet.
The fields in light yellow are automatically calculated and should not be altered directly.
All bank accounts, such as checking, savings, certificate of deposit, etc. will be entered below along with their current bank balances. This will add all account balances to the Total Current Bank Balance.
If you are reconciled (bold values match), you’ll see the reconciled status at the bottom:
If you are unreconciled, you’ll see the unreconciled status and the difference at the bottom:
If not reconciled, go through all the steps above again to double check. You might also look to see if there is a single transaction in your journal or bank account that matches the unreconciled difference. If there is, that’s probably the issue.
And remember, the Journal uses the total from your Funds sheet as the starting balance for the year!
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