Bank Reconciliations

Recently, I assisted a client with their bank reconciliations.  The comment was made to me by someone that they enjoyed completing bank reconciliations and my initial response was that they are fun to complete unless there is a penny variance that you must search for.  We all know this can take some significant time and cost more money to find the penny than to adjust it off.  Enter Business Central reconciliations; once all items have been matched to the banking items the variance sticks out like a neon light at night.  Before we can locate any variances let’s walk through the process of completing a bank reconciliation in Business Central. 

From the bank account reconciliation screen the transactions from Business Central will populate on the right-hand side of the screen under Bank Account Ledger Entries.  To add the bank account transactions to match in Business Central an easy way to add the transactions is to download and format an excel file.  Here is an example of how the formatting will need to appear in the excel file for Business Central.  Make sure the amount columns are formatted as a number.

Once the excel is ready highlight all lines excluding the headers and copy and paste them directly into the first cell of Business Central under the Bank Statement Lines.  It should look like this once they have been added.

You’re now ready to begin matching the transactions to the ledger entries.  Matching can be completed a few different ways depending on your personal preference.  They can be matched automatically for time efficiency or manually matched by each transaction.  Once all bank transactions have been matched and the statement ending balance and the total balance on the reconciliation screen are the same the reconciliation can be finalized and posted.  If there is a variance it will be easy to spot it in the Test report.  The report can be found under post, select the test report to review for any discrepancies.  This is also a good report to save as a supportive workpaper for the reconciliation.  For this example, I created a 0.30 variance on a transfer to show how easy it is to see on the Test report. 

From here we can see the variance easily and can go back into Business Central and make any necessary changes to the transaction.  Once the variance is resolved and the reconciliation is completed, we can post the reconciliation in Business Central.