The Bank Reconciliation report allows you to check that you have correctly entered all transactions related to a specific bank account. Accountants call this process Bank Reconciliation or a Bank Rec.

In preparation for performing a bank reconciliation, you will need a copy of your bank statement, or have retrieved and/or
printed a copy online through your online banking service (herein referred to as your ’statement’).

A reconciled bank account occurs when the sum of all transactions on a Bank Statement equals the sum of all transactions entered into your online accounting file for that same period and Bank Account. The frequency with which you do Bank Reconciliation’s depends on your transaction flow, they can occur daily, weekly, monthly or annually in most cases. They are always performed at least at year end to ensure your bank balance in your online accounts matches that on you bank statement (except some transactions that will be mentioned below).

You may have to take into account transactions that have been entered into your online accounting file that have not yet appeared on your bank statement. These may include:

• Cheques you have written and entered into your online accounting file but they haven’t been cleared in you bank account yet (”uncleared cheque payments”).
• Credit Card payments received from customers through your merchant facility that haven’t been deposited into your bank account yet (”uncleared merchant receipts”).

What is the Reconciliation Equation?

Account Balance equals = Statement Balance - Uncleared Payments + Uncleared Receipts

What is doing a tick-off?

A tick off is simply putting a tick on each item that appears on both your Bank Statement and your online accounting files Bank Statement Reconciliation report for the same account.

Items remaining un-ticked on your Bank Statement may not have been entered into your online accounting file or they may have been entered with incorrect details.

Alternately, the Bank Reconciliation report may include transactions that do not appear on your Bank Statement. These may be bank errors or uncleared transactions that will appear on your next Bank Statement received.

There are two ways that you can this report:

• Print the report and manually tick off each transaction
• Use the special features of the report to store the reconciliation information

This later approach has the benefit of allowing you to return to this report and know what has been reconciled, and also has a feature that helps you to check your closing balance in the system is correct.

How To Use This Report

The following steps outline how to use the special features of the report:

1. In the settings screen, choose your bank account and enter the start date and end date as listed on your statement
2. Click the View to load the report with these settings
3. Enter the opening balance as listed on your statement in the box labelled ‘Opening balance as at …’ (the ‘…’ will be substituted with the start date you have selected). By default Saasu inserts the calculated opening balance into this field (see Calculation Area and Calculated Opening Balance below)
4. Enter the closing balance as listed on your statement in the box labelled ‘Statement closing balance as at …’ (the ‘…’ will be substituted with the end date you have selected)
5. Tick any items that appear in your bank statement using the check boxes next to each item
6. We recommend that you also write a tick (in pencil) next to each item on your statement. This helps you to identify items on your statement that have not been entered into Saasu
7. Once you have ticked all of the items and difference is zero, click the Save button at the bottom of the screen so that Saasu can store the ticks with each transaction

Some Really Helpful Ideas

• If you edit a transaction, or choose to go to another screen or report (to enter, edit or check a transaction for example) without first clicking the Save button you will lose your changes.
• If you want to edit a transaction from the report (to change the date, for example), click the transaction in the report. To delete a transaction, click the transaction in the report to open it for editing, and then click the Delete button.
• If you find that a transaction appears on your statement, but doesn’t appear in the Bank Reconciliation report, first check that the transaction hasn’t been entered using a different bank account, or on a different date. If you find that the transaction has not been entered, add it in the usual way and return to the Bank Reconciliation report.
• If you have a lot of transactions, you may find it quicker to tick all transactions first (you can do this by clicking the check box in the header of the list of transactions), and then un-tick items that don’t appear on your statement.

About the Report

• The options you chose on the report settings screen appear at the top of the report. If you want to change these options, click the ‘Change Report Settings…’ link at the top of the report.
• Calculation Area - The area at the top of the screen (where you enter your opening and closing balance) has some extra features to help you to check that you reconciliation is accurate. If you enter the opening and closing balance of your statement, this area will calculate the total of all of the ticked items, and add this to your entered opening balance to produce a calculated closing balance. If all of the entered information is correct, and you have ticked off all of the relevant transactions, the calculated closing balance should equal the entered closing balance taken from your statement. If not, a transaction has either been entered incorrectly, ticked incorrectly, or is missing.
• The difference between these totals is also shown. The calculations in this area are updated dynamically as you tick each item off.
• Calculated Opening Balance - The calculated opening balance is the balance of the account basis all of the reconciled transactions related to the account that have been entered into Saasu prior to the date selected as the start date. This may validly be different to the actual opening balance of your bank account.

FAQ’s

How is "Difference" calculated

This value shows you the difference between the closing balance of your statement (the value you have entered into the ‘Statement closing balance as at …’ field), plus the sum of the entered opening balance (the value you have entered into the ‘Statement opening balance as at …’ field) and the total of all ticked items. When this value is $0.00 your bank reconciliation is correct.

When it is not = $0.00, this is the amount that is yet to be reconciled. If you think that this is incorrect, make sure that:

• The amount for each transaction matches the amount on the bank statement
• All of the transactions on your bank statement are listed and ticked in the report
• No transactions in the report are ticked that don’t appear in your bank statement