Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation is the process in which the cash book balance at a given time is compared against and reconciled with the bank statement's ending balance. Discrepancies between the cash book and bank statement balances can occur for reasons such as delays in the time it takes payment institutions to process certain transactions, unexpected payment institution charges and fees, as well as many other reasons. 

To control the automatic matching of transactions between the cashbook and the bank statement, you can change the automatic matching attributes for each payment type group for each payment institute.

Matching Transactions

You can match transactions manually, semi-manually, or automatically. Any cash transaction that is not matched will remain in the system so that it may be matched in a subsequent reconciliation process.

• Manual Process: Cash transactions in the system are manually matched against a hard-copy version of the bank statement. This is a complete reconciliation process.
  
• Semi Manual Process: The payment institution's statement balance is loaded into the system, and you can either perform an automatic matching against the bank statement ending balance or perform a manual transaction matching by selecting a transaction from the cashbook to be matched against a bank statement transaction. You can also create a transaction in the cashbook using the bank statement information. To do this, use the Create Transaction right mouse button option in the Automatic Transaction Matching window. The transaction created can then be manually matched with the bank statement transaction.
  
• Automatic Process: The payment institute's statement, including the ending balance and each bank transaction, is loaded into the system and each bank transaction is automatically matched against the cash account transactions. If the bank statement contains cashed check transactions, but the corresponding checks are still open in the system, these checks can be automatically cashed. Doing so would lead to the automatic matching of the bank statement transactions. (The detailed statement is delivered by the payment institution in the form of a file.)
  There are two ways of cashing open checks in the bank reconciliation process: 
  1.You can cash them in the loading process by setting the load parameter Cash And Match Checks to True.    
  2.The Cash And Match Open Checks right mouse button option enables open checks to be cashed after the bank statement is loaded.

After you have performed the semi-manual and automatic matching processes, you can modify or undo incorrectly-matched transactions. You also can manually match transactions that were omitted during the automatic matching process. Once you complete this process, you will have a final, reconciled file.

Usually you should not modify any transaction that has been reconciled (matched). However, if you must modify the transaction, you can use the Rollback feature. The rollback feature retrieves the final matched file for modification. You can undo or modify only those transactions reconciled during the last matching process. You can use the rollback feature with manually matched files as well. 

Following Up on the Reconciliation Process

After the reconciliation process has been completed, you can optionally perform any of the following activities:

• View online results of the reconciliation. 
• Print a reconciliation report.