New Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation in Manager has three stages.

  1. You are asked to enter the date as of which you wish to be reconciled.
  2. Manager will then ask for closing balance as of that date. If the closing balance entered doesn’t agree with what has been entered in Manager, you will be then asked for closing balances on various days in order for Manager to determine on which exact days you don’t reconcile.
  3. Once Manager determines which days transactions entered don’t reconcile, it will show you closing balances as per bank statement you have entered and then list of transactions in Manager. You will be then asked to make sure that movement between closing balances as per bank statement matches with movement as per entered transactions in Manager.

So this process guarantees you will always reconcile.

However if you don’t have closing balances as per various days on your bank statement, you can’t properly finish the step 2.). In order to avoid this problem, you can disable reconciliation assistant which means you will be required to enter closing balance only as of the date you wish to reconcile. Then you will be transferred to step 3.).

If you have previously tried to reconcile with bank reconciliation assistant (it couldn’t be turned off previously), Manager still remembers your closing balances. If those closing balances are wrong and you don’t really know the correct ones, you would be stuck in step 3.).

To fix this issue, I’ve added to the latest version (15.1.61) ability to make Manager forget those wrong closing balances.

When you make it to this screen:

And you want Manager to “forget” closing balance as at 26/03/2015 because you don’t know what it is, simply click Edit button and delete it.

Keep in mind, in relation to unpresented cheques and uncleared deposits, bank reconciliation process doesn’t make it easy to “clear” these transactions by “ticking them off” but it is something I’m currently working on.

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Why is my opening bank balance in “Uncleared Deposits”?

@Ahmed_Anees, this was a bug in yesterday’s version. If you upgrade, it should be resolved. Sorry about that.

I have noted in the improved version, there is no allowance to use journal entries to post transactions during bank reconciliations. In as much we would want a simple software, it is important to use journal entries to post such transactions since it leaves audit trail. The earlier versions were good in this area.

This is a change made many months ago. All bank and cash account transactions are handled through the Bank Accounts or Cash Accounts tabs. But all the same records are created. Only the workflow is a little different. The idea was to prevent errors by removing the need for less-experienced users to have to figure out which account to debit and which to credit.

New to the software and I have to agree with many of the earlier comments that a tickling process for the reconciliation is the only way to go - leaving the system to do it would be a nightmare in the case of double or incorrect allocations. I have yet to reconcile but on a trial I wasn’t able to print out a reconciliation report - if that is the case, in my opinion a report is essential so hope that it will be considered for future upgrades.

Besides using software, one should also be familiar with the manual process of bank reconciliation. There are many complex guide lines on the internet. However this one is pretty simple:

So, for manual clearing, I am now running a reconciliation report which shows the list of uncleared receipts and payments. I click on the amounts to open them then change status to cleared as I tick off against the statement.

Any thoughts on being able to ‘tick’ them off the list versus open each item and flip it’s status. I know this was talked about a long time ago. Have been away from the forums for a while, but, with the new reconciliation report process it would be a far leap to add a check box or button next to each uncleared item on the report to allow them to be ‘ticked off’ to clear, rather than having to click on the amount (hyperlink) to go the detail and change status?

Thoughts?

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I think this would be great.

The main issue is that when you are marking transactions as cleared, you should also enter the date when transaction was cleared on bank statement. So just ticking off isn’t enough.

Ticking off is what other accounting systems do. And if everything goes well, reconciliation takes less time. However if something goes wrong, accounting system will provide no assistance whatsoever to help you find error. You have to literally repeat the whole bank reconciliation process. This is why most people hate bank reconciliation because at the end of the process, if balances don’t match, they wasted time as they have to repeat the whole process again hoping the next time balances match - maybe.

Manager asks for little bit more information when marking transactions as cleared and this information goes long way if something goes wrong in order to find the problem. Especially if you are reconciling bank account with many transactions.

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Understanding that the report screen is a standard template but it would be more user friendly (self explanatory) if Edit said Date and View said Balance (or Bal) - if it must remain two buttons.

Friendlier, would be one button with two input fields