Bank Reconciliation Discrepancies

This article deals with bookkeeping reconciliation discrepancies with your bank account.

Normally, when you are trying to match a bank account balance to the associated bank account balance in your books, you should be able to match each and every transaction that had occurred within a certain time period. The more often you complete a bank account reconciliation, then the less likely you will run into issues. However, oftentimes, it is feasible to only complete this task on a monthly or longer basis.

But, in any case, you will inevitably run into reconciliation issues from time to time no matter what. Typically, these issues can be resolved rather quickly, but sometimes this is not the case, especially if it has been a long time since you last reconciled the bank account.

To avoid having to search through and check off each and every transaction, the following is a brief list of tactics you can utilize to help narrow down and ultimately find the cause of your bank account reconciliation discrepancy issues:

1. Find the total balances of your deposits and withdrawals.
   1. Usually, a bank statement will have these two balances listed for you at the top of the statement, and thus you can find out from which side (from the deposits or withdrawals side) the reconciliation issue is coming from.
2. Dollars and Cents
   1. If your reconciliation discrepancy is only off by, say 10 cents, then you will only review transactions that also have cents as well. So, you will avoid transactions that are only dollar amounts (such as $110 or $2,346, etc, etc).
3. Sort by Amounts
   1. If you bookkeeping software allows it, sort your deposits and withdrawals lists in your reconciliations screen by amounts. This might be a fast way to discover a missing transaction.
4. Find exact transaction amount to match to your reconciliation discrepancy amount:
   1. Oftentimes, your reconciliation discrepancy amount is only being caused by one duplicate transaction, so find a transaction amount that is equal exactly to your reconciliation discrepancy balance.
5. Look past the closing date:
   1. Your closing date is your reconciliation balance date. Sometimes, for various reasons, a transaction in your books is posted beyond the reconciliation date as per the bank statement. So be sure you can also view these post-dated transactions on your reconciliation screen in your bookkeeping software as well.

Note: AccuraBooks is a bookkeeping firm only, so please consult with your C.P.A. for verification and clarification about the contents of this article.