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Cash: Bank Reconciliations: What Is A Bank Reconciliation?
Cash: Bank Reconciliations: What Is A Bank Reconciliation?
For many students, bank reconciliations are a difficult topic because most people don’t
do them anymore. Twenty years ago, before debit cards and online banking, there was
only one way to keep track of how much money you had in the bank: keep a checkbook
and reconcile it.
Clearly, online banking has not made us better at managing our bank accounts. In
2012, U.S. consumers paid $32 billion in overdraft fees. That’s approximately $135 per
adult in the United States! Maybe we should consider going back to writing down all our
transactions and balancing our checkbooks!
How to start
To do a bank reconciliation, you’ll need a copy of the bank statement and a copy of all
of the outstanding items in the checking account through the ending date of the bank
statement. For some businesses, including my own, the bank statement does not close
at the end of the month. Sometimes the statement end date is based on the date the
account was opened.
Once you have those two items, use a pencil or highlighter to mark off all the items that
appear on both the bank statement and the check register. If an item appears on both,
that means that the item was properly recorded and has cleared. After going through all
the items, anything that remains unmarked is a an item that will need to be dealt with in
the reconciliation.
Create two columns on a piece of paper or use a spreadsheet to do the calculations for
you. My bank reconciliations look like a large T-account.
Start by writing the ending balance for the book and the bank under the appropriate
column.
I like to do the bank side first because it is generally easier than the book side. You are
only dealing with outstanding checks and deposits in transit on the bank side. List the
deposits in transit and the outstanding checks. Add the deposits in transit to the
beginning balance and subtract the outstanding checks.
The bank side is relatively easy to do. That is why I like to do that side first. It is more
likely to be correct if you have an error in your reconciliation. Most students who have
errors have them on the book side. Being confident in the bank side helps resolve errors
on the book side.
On the book side, most items are fairly simple. Subtract bank service charges and add
interest income. Subtract returned checks. Add unrecorded deposits and subtract
unrecorded withdrawals. The last item, recording errors, requires a bit more thinking.
Let’s imagine that you recorded a check for $715, but the bank cleared that check for
$751. The check was used to pay for utilities and was recorded to utilities expense for
$715. If the check cleared for $751, what happened to your utilities expense? Did it
increase or decrease? It increased because more was paid for utilities. If the expense
increased, cash must have decreased. Therefore, cash must be adjusted down or
decreased by $36. This would be subtracted from book side of the reconciliation.
Thinking about what is happening to your expenses can help you work your way
through the problem.
Once you have worked through all the remaining items on the book side, compute the
reconciled balance for the books.