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When reconciling a bank account, is there any tricks or go-to stratagies to find your errors?
When reconciling a bank account, everyone has their own tips and tricks and each user will develop their own as they progress. I'll list out my process for you below and you can feel free to use my tricks until you find what works best for you.
1. Type in the Bank Statement Date as the date of the last transaction showing on my paper statement.
2. Type in the Bank Statement Balance as my closing balance on my paper statement.
3. The bank reconciliation screen can be sorted by any of the columns displayed in the screen, and I use that sort feature frequently during my reconciliation to help me find what I'm looking for.
i. I like to reconcile all of my deposits first so I sort my list by Type first and check to make sure that all the transactions of type "D" on the screen are also shown on my bank statement.
ii. Once all of my deposits are reconciled I move on to my withdrawls. To make this easier for me I sort the transactions on my screen by the Amount column and take the transactions one at a time in the order in which they appear on my bank statement. For Example; the first withdrawl on my bank statement is dated April 2nd, and my statement indicates that it was cheque #228 for $1,454.89. Because my transactions are sorted by the amount, I only have to scroll down the list until I see that amount, verify that it is cheque #228 in my system too and I know that this transaction is reconciled. I can check it off on the screen and on my paper statement and move on to my next transaction.
4. Once I'm finished going through all of the transactions on my paper statement I may be left with transactions on the statement that I couldn't find in Analyst; these will need to be entered into the program. I also want to go through the transactions that remain unchecked on my screen as it's possible some of those transactions shouldn't be there either and are a result of duplicate entry or possibly stale dated items. A good rule of thumb when examining these is that a transaction *should* remain unchecked if I expect it to show on the paper statement during the following two or three months. If I don't expect it to clear my bank account in the next couple of months then it shouldn't be on the screen.
5. Once my difference at the bottom right shows a difference of $0.00 then I know that I am reconciled and I can Record the reconciliation.