Why do we need statement reconciliation?
Your bank or credit supplier will supply you with either a traditional Printed Statement or an electronic PDF in non-alterable form, to use as a record of your transactions. Both of these documents are in an auditable form and are referred to as “Printed Statement” in the following discussion.
Whilst Budgets Get Real does import your actual bank data, some form of reconciliation with your Printed Statement is still necessary.
For a start, you still have to check your Printed Statements for excessive interest charges on your mortgage, unauthorised transactions on your credit card and any transactions in any account, which you did not make!
The reconciliation process is very much faster than by other methods, but you still need to check that your imports are accurate and complete, to ensure your records are accurate. This section on reconciliation covers issues such as checking that your transactions are importing correctly, that there are no duplicates or omissions and that your balances are correct.
The Reconciliation Process.
Access is from the Transaction Register Screen.
Go to the Display Menu and click Display Statement.
Enter your date range – The from date is the date you have exported transactions from.
The opening balance is calculated at the close of the day before the beginning of your import.
In the above example, several different types of transactions are apparent.
· BLACK- Ordinary imported transactions.
· Bold date in column 1- The date has been changed.
· GREY- Excluded transactions that are not part of your balance.
· RED in columns 1 and 2 Additional transactions
· GREEN in column 1-Manually entered transactions.
Opening Balance should agree with your Printed Statement.
The opening Balance is calculated by Budgets GetReal by adding all transactions to the end of the day, prior to the start of your import range.
It will not agree if:
· You have not set a balance
· Your previous balances were not correctly set.
· You have imported or enter prior to the “Statement Date.”
(The concepts of Statement Date and Statement Balance have been discussed under Balances and are necessary for understanding the reconciliation process described.)
If you need to fix:
Go back and find where in your records the balances In Budgets Get Real match the Printed Statements. Any error or errors must be after this date, and needs to be corrected before you can move on!
If the opening balance is correct! - You can go on to the next step.
Check your Closing Balance with the Printed Statement.
The Opening balances must agree – otherwise you should return to the section above before proceeding.
If both balances Agree!
- You can assume that your transactions are correct.
- You may wish to check them.
We advise that you check them at least the first few times and periodically thereafter.
If the balances do not Agree!
- You have duplicate, missing or extra transactions.
- You may have imported the wrong statement.
If the problem is the wrong statement- Go to Display Menu and click on Last Import. The Clear Statement button should appear. Click on this to clear the last imported statement.
If you have imported the correct statement and your opening balances agree but the closing balances are different, there are probably additional, extra or missing transactions present. You need to go to How to adjust imported transactions.
At this point you may also check that there are no discrepancies between dates, on the electronic downloads and Printed Statements; some banks actually can have different dates between different statements and the date can be adjusted as described…Dates
If you can see that some transactions are being excluded that should not be - go to Excluded on the display menu. You can also exclude wrong transactions or add a missing transaction. Using the [+] to add.
Having found duplicate, extra or missing transactions, you naturally need to fix them.
Handy Hint: Check that your import is correct each time that you import.
You can delete statements, in the reverse order that you imported them, but may end up having to delete subsequent, possibly good imports.
In addition:
- Your configuration may need altering
- The bank may have altered its procedures.
- If it clearly is a bank configuration issue, please let us know. We would like to fix it for you and other customers!
Cheques and cheque reconciliation.
Special issues relate to cheques and reconciling cheques. These are discussed in Cheques.
