When you are reconciling your accounts each month, have you noticed that there are Uncleared Transactions on your Reconciliation Detail Reports?   It is expected that some transactions may not have cleared your bank at the time of statement closing, such as checks that were recently printed and mailed.  What you should always be careful to look for, however, are uncleared transactions that are older than 30 days old.

If you are not reconciling your accounts, but you still want to check for old uncleared transactions, you can still find this information:

1. Click on Reports>Custom Reports> Transaction Detail Report.  
2. On the Display tab, choose This Fiscal Year to make sure you haven’t missed transactions from the beginning of the year.  (If you are not sure that everything was cleared out in a previous year, you may want to select All here instead.  **Please note that making changes in a closed period is not recommended without direction from your CPA).  Make sure you have selected Accrual or Cash as appropriate.  You may also choose your Total By and Sort By selections here.  If you are checking all of your accounts at once, you may want to Total By Account List for easier and more clear viewing.
3. On the Filters tab, choose which Account you would like to check on.  If you would like to see all relevant accounts, leave this defaulted to All Accounts.  Scroll down to Cleared, and click on the radio button for No.  Now click OK.
4. Your report will now show all uncleared transactions for the account(s) you selected.

As described above, there are some acceptable reasons for some old uncleared transactions.  However, you may find that some of these old uncleared transactions need your immediate attention.  There are many reasons that there may be old uncleared transactions in an account. Following are some of the more common reasons:

• The transaction was entered under the wrong account.  (For example, you booked a purchase under the checking account, but it was made on the credit card account).
• The check was lost either in the mail or by the recipient.
• You entered a transaction twice.  (I always go back to my register and make sure that this isn’t simply a duplicate entry).
• The vendor never processed the transaction.  Just like people, machines sometimes miss things.  It is entirely possible that while processing their daily transactions, a vendor’s software lost or missed some transactions.

In any case, you should do the research and make every effort to clear these transactions so that you don’t have loose ends hanging around in your books.

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.