Tip of the week from Brenda Hopkins – Week 8

Reconcile Bank Account Daily

• With today’s internet access, there is no reason not to balance the bank account daily.


• Daily balancing provides up to date cash position, float information and speeds month end processing since bank balancing is simply one more day.


• Download your bank info from your bank’s website.


• Start bank reconciliation process and reconcile it to zero.


• DON’T push the reconcile button.


• Save the reconciliation and come back tomorrow.

Depending on the size of your company and if you own Electronic Reconciliation module you have different options so that everyone can Reconcile their Bank Account Daily.

Option 1:
Use the Electronic Reconciliation module and get a daily file from your bank.

Option 2:
Using your bank's website download the daily transactions and manually clear the files in the Bank Reconciliation module.

Steps:

1. Go to your bank's website, get today's posted balance and print out the daily transactions back to when you last got your statement.


2. Start a bank reconciliation process in Microsoft Dynamics GP.


3. Enter today's posted balance for the bank statement ending balance and use today's date for the dates.


4. Check off cleared items and balance the statement to a zero difference.


5. When finished, click OK. DON'T CLICK RECONCILE! Clicking OK will save the reconciliations.


6. On the next day, repeat these steps for 1 day's worth of transactions.


7. At month end, verify the totals with the statement and then click reconcile. The month end bank reconciliation process is now minutes, not hours.
   

Hints:

1. There may be a few days at month end where you can't reconcile into the next month until you have received the final statement. In this case you can either rely on the website as the final reconciling document or have a few days to make up early in the next month. Both options have problems, I've seen banks have website issues that cause the statement and website to not match, but this is pretty rare. However, delaying a few days tends to break the nice daily balancing rhythm you develop. There's no perfect option, pick whichever one fits your business requirements.


2. Make sure you know where you left off from the day before. Often bank websites won't let you print just one day, you have to print the whole screen which can overlap days.