Cheques and banks
Reconcile a bank account with its statement
Import your bank statement, match its lines to the transactions in your books, and close the period once the difference between the bank and your ledger is explained.
3 min readLast updated
In this article
A bank reconciliation proves that your bank account in the books agrees with the bank's own statement. You work in sessions: one session covers one bank account for one period. You import the statement lines, match each line to a transaction in your books, and complete the session when the remaining difference is explained. Reconciliation never posts anything to the ledger; it only records which lines agree.
Before you start
Export the statement from your bank as a CSV or text file, up to 10 MB. Each row needs, in this order: date, reference, description, debit and credit.
Have the opening and closing balances of the statement for the period at hand.
Start a session
Open Accounting › Accounts › Bank Reconciliation. The list shows each session's Bank account, Period, Opening balance, Closing balance and Status.
Select Start session.
Choose the Bank account.
Enter the Period start and Period end.
Enter the Opening balance and Closing balance from the bank statement.
Select Start session.
Select a session in the list to open it. The top of the session shows the period, the two balances and the Unreconciled difference.
Import the statement
In the session, select Import statement.
Choose the Statement file (CSV/TXT).
Leave File has a header row on if the first row holds column titles.
Leave Skip duplicate lines on to ignore lines that were already imported.
Select Import statement to upload the file. A message reports how many lines were imported and skipped.
Match the lines
Select Auto-match. The system matches the lines it is confident about by amount and date, and reports how many it matched.
Use the status filter to show the lines that are still Unmatched.
For each remaining line, open its Actions menu and select Match.
Choose the Transaction type: Account transaction, Customer transaction, Supplier transaction or Cheque.
Enter the Transaction ID. For an account transaction, it is the number in the ID column of the transactions list (Accounting › Transactions › Transactions).
Select Match. The line becomes Manually matched.
To undo a match, select Unmatch on the line. To remove a line imported by mistake, select Delete; only unmatched lines can be deleted.
Read the difference
The Unreconciled difference is the movement on the bank statement (closing balance minus opening balance) less the net of the ledger transactions you have matched. When every line is matched, it should be zero. A remaining difference usually points to one of these:
a bank charge or interest not yet recorded in your books: record it, for example as an expense, then match it;
a deposit or payment recorded in the books with a different amount;
a cheque that is in your books but not yet on the statement.
Complete the session
When the difference is explained, select Complete session and confirm. A completed session is locked: you can no longer import or match lines in it.
Common questions
Does reconciliation change my balances? No. It never posts to the ledger. Correct the books with normal vouchers or journal entries.
What happens to a matched cheque that bounces? Bouncing the cheque removes its match, and its statement line returns to unmatched. See Collect or bounce a cheque.