Bank reconciliation

Bank reconciliation, or ‘checking’ the entries, involves verifying, when the bank provides a statement, that the incoming and outgoing transactions recorded by the bank have indeed been entered in the accounts. This is one of the essential requirements for maintaining a strictly accurate account.

Access: Accounting → Receipts and Payments, then the button Reconcile button in the list of entries.

Let’s say you start your business in February: you’ve received payment of 120 for an invoice into your account and purchased 24’s worth of supplies.

At the end of the month, your bank issues a statement for your current account covering the past period.

To record this first statement, open the list of entries, and click the Reconcilebutton.

You can then enter the end date of your account statement and the closing balance.

The end date is shown on your bank statement. The closing balance, assuming we had a previous balance of 0, is now 120–24, which is 96.

Now reconcile each entry by simply double-clicking on the entries in the list that you can see appear on the statement provided by your bank.

Once you have reconciled these two entries, the 1, which was flashing red, will change to a steady green.

In the following month, you receive 132 in payments and incur 60 in expenditure.

When you return to the reconciliation mode, Gestan will prompt you to record your second account statement.

Once the reconciliation of your entries is complete, the ‘Statements’ button in the journal entry list opens the list of bank account statements.

In this case, everything is correct: both the reconciled discrepancy and the posted discrepancy are zero.

On this screen, when the screen first appears, the balances are automatically recalculated for the latest bank statement.

The Calculate button allows you to recalculate the values for the selected bank statement, whilst the Recalculate All button allows you to recalculate all account statements for the selected account.

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