Author: Alita Hall

Posted on

7 Reasons to Reconcile

One of the most recurring themes I have noticed as a bookkeeper is most business owners have not reconciled their bank or credit card accounts. I think this is due to the fact that some of them may not understand how powerful a simple task like this is AND how much information it can tell them about their businesses.

Here are 7 reasons why this task is so crucial to the overall financial health of your business.

  1. Errors - Performing a reconciliation of your bank accounts every month can help locate errors made by you or the bank. Not to mention can catch illicit transfers performed within your accounts. This is especially essential if you have set up bank feeds in your accounting software.
  2. Prevention - Unauthorized charges by the bank, check fraud, and other serious issues can be identified AND corrected. Miscellaneous charges and large, out of the ordinary purchases are some prime examples.
  3. Powerful Decision Making - When you know where your money is coming from and where it is going, when you know all transactions are accurate and that balances are correct, you as the owner can make some very powerful decisions in regards to your company. You can determine if that new office building is obtainable for starters.
  4. Financial Fitness - Performing a bank reconciliation is like going to the doctor for a regular checkup. With frequent monitoring, any issues that arise can be solved quickly before things get out of hand. And it is a great, built in checks and balances to ensure all transactions have been recorded.
  5. Saves Money - Bank errors can sometimes mean thousands of dollars are misplaced leaving your account in dire straits. Transposition of numbers when entering a check is an example of how large sums of money can be misplaced by the bank. (This is rare).
  6. Mitigating Risk - When errors are found and reported to the bank in a timely fashion, the financial risk is transferred from your company to the bank. Translation: You do not have to pay for their error.
  7. Peace of Mind - There is no substitute for the relief knowing that your finances are accurate and every income item and expense transaction is accounted for.

Double deposits and checks still outstanding 1 year after being mailed? All of these issues can be identified with frequent account reconciliations. With online banking being what it is today, business owners, you know longer have to wait until the month is over and you are mailed a statement to reconcile. You can simply log in to your online bank account and download transaction data to reconcile daily or monthly; giving you faster response time on catching errors and fraudulent activity.

For more information on the power of reconciliation, schedule a consultation or email us at [email protected].

AMH Bookkeeping, LLC. Your books. Clean and simple.

Posted on

Bank Feeds – Good or Bad?

QB Feed

Setting up bank feeds within your accounting software is a huge time saver if you are making hundreds of transactions per month. Particularly if the rules to code them are accurate and all data comes across as it should. Right?

For the purpose of this post I will refer to the accounting program I use, QuickBooks Desktop Accountant and how bank feeds work within the program.

Bank feeds for those doing LESS than 100 transactions per month is more time consuming than to simply enter the transactions by hand and I will give you my whys.

  1. More often than not, the transactions that are downloaded are not properly coded to the income or expense accounts. Which brings me to my next point.
  2. The rules needed to ensure proper coding are, more often than not, created incorrectly.
  3. They create numerous entries into the "Other Names" list in QuickBooks for example; creating another task of cleaning up this list.
  4. In QuickBooks desktop they are imported and treated as if they are already reconciled. WHAT? Now they have to be cleared and properly reconciled depending on the frequency of reconciliations.
  5. It may take a long while before and error is caught and the clean-up can be expensive once found.

To answer the question, I think bank feeds are not productive in the long run. I understand you do not want the hassle of entering them in manually and there are some other accounting professionals out there who will disagree with me. I do not claim to know how they work with QuickBooks Online so I will not speak on that.

If you are a QuickBooks Desktop user and are thinking about bank feeds or are currently using them but things are not balancing, AMH Bookkeeping, LLC is here to help. Visit our website HERE to schedule a consultation now.

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