One of the most basic accounting tasks you’re going to do with QuickBooks in your small business is to reconcile a bank account. While most of the time the process will be smooth and easy, sometimes you’ll wind up with a discrepancy. QuickBooks makes it easy and fast to reconcile the account and close out your register for the month.
Here’s the process you’re going to go through to reconcile your bank account with QuickBooks:
- Start by opening the Reconciliation window by clicking Banking => Reconile.
- Choose which account you wish to reconcile. You’ll have a drop-down list of your accounts to choose from.
- In the Statement Date Box, choose the end date of the statement that you’re using to reconcile.
- Input the ending balance from your statement into the Ending balance box.
- Enter Service Charges and Interest Earned amounts in their respective boxes.
- Double-check that the information you just put in is correct, then click Continue.
- Click the checkbox next to transactions that have cleared. You’ll have checks, payments, deposits, and other credits to verify.
- During this process, if you realize that you’ve put in a service charge, interest amount, or ending balance incorrectly, you can click Modify to go back to the Begin Reconciliation box.
- Verify that your cleared balance and your ending balance match up. Once they do, click Reconcile Now. QuickBooks will then allow you to print a reconciliation report if you wish.
- If any transactions have been edited since the last time the account was reconciled, you can click the Discrepancy Report in order to find out what they might be. There is also the option to sort your columns within the Reconciliation window in order to arrange the accounts how you want to arrange them.
There’s really not anything more to it than that. The key is to make sure that you’re reconciling your bank account each time you get a statement. Skipping it just once can cause you a number of problems. Not only will the whole process be that much more tedious the next time around, you create a greater likelihood that you’ll have an error. In addition, it’s important to have a handle on the cash flow of your business so that there are no surprises like returned checks, deposits that should have been made that don’t show up, or tax issues, as the company in this case study found out.
