Today’s post is by Technical Support Specialist and accounting guru Andrea Whitney.
Oh, that wonderful task you get to do once a month! So you go into Bank and click Recon. Then what? Well, start by getting your monthly statement from your bank. Once you have that, select the end date of the statement on the screen.
Upon the reconciliation opening up, enter in the ending balance in the Statement Balance field. You will notice that the last time a user posted, cleared and exited a Bank Recon will show in the upper left corner. This is for informational purposes only.
Now you’re ready to start. And just in case you need to get up or come back to this, you can also click on Save/Refresh for the system to save your place. This will maintain all items that were checked as checked if you close out of the Bank Recon screen. Upon returning, update the statement balance and go forth and conquer!
First, review your bank statement for deposits. You will notice that deposits will always be called credits. When you see a deposit on the screen that matches one in the statement, check the OK box for the line item in Bank Recon.
You can see the details of the deposit by double-clicking on the deposit number. This will open a new window with a list all the components of the deposit. At this point if you need to dive further to the individual debit and credit, you can double-click on the date of the desired line.
Check off all deposits that cleared in the Bank Recon window, and confirm your total deposit/credits balance with the total deposits on your bank statement. Now review the deposits/credits that are marked as cleared in deposits/credits; this should match the bank statement.
Next up are checks/debits. First, find the Direct Deposit items. You can left-click on the headers to determine how deposits are ordered. In this case, select Check Number, then locate the first date that has a Direct Deposit check number. (Normally a Direct Deposit has a different sequence number to reflect the difference between it and a paycheck.)
Right-click on the Check Number field on a Direct Deposit line, then look in the white box to the right of Summary on the end of the page. The box should equal the total Direct Deposits for the day selected. Upon matching this to the statement, click on Clear DirDep. You will receive a pop-up box with a confirmation for the date. Click OK and all Direct Deposits for the date are checked.
You can then clear an entire range of checks, if you’d like, by selecting Clear Range. Enter in the starting and ending check numbers and click Continue. This will check all the checks in the range. You can also individually select which checks to clear. Once you are done with all checks/debits, you should be able to review the items marked as cleared, and this should match the total debits on your bank statement.
Click Summary and all should be in balance. You can now click Print under Summary to show you are in balance. You may also want to print the deposits/credits and checks/debits. This will show you not only what was marked to be cleared, but also what was outstanding at the time of the reconciliation. Last but not least, click the Post Cleared and Exit ,and you are done! Well, until next month.
If you’d like to get more of this expertise on accounting in COATS, call Andrea at 1-800-888-5894 or email her. We’re so glad she uses her powers for good!