General Ledger > Reconcile Account Balances

Reconciling an account regularly is a good accounting practice that leads to more accurate financial statements. When you reconcile an account, you are proving that the transactions that sum to the ending account balance for an account are correct. This means you can prove one of the following two assertions:

•That the transactions included in a revenue, expense, gain, or loss account belong in that account; or

•That the transactions included in an asset, liability, or equity account are valid, and so should not be flushed out of the balance sheet by shifting the transactions into accounts associated with the income statement.

An account reconciliation is usually done for all asset, liability, and equity accounts, since their account balances may continue on for many years. It is less common to reconcile a revenue or expense account, since the account balances are flushed out at the end of each fiscal year. However, this may be done simply to verify that transactions were recorded in the correct account. An account balance reconciliation may reveal that a transaction should be shifted into a different account.

AccountMate's Reconcile Account Balances function allows you mark journal entry details as reconciled and to track those that have been verified and reconciled in the system. It can also be used to determine journal entry details that are posted to the wrong GL Account IDs and allows you to correct the transaction entries provided that these are created by non-GL modules and that GL is configured to Allow Editing of GL Accounts in Subsidiary Module Entries.

Perform the following steps to reconcile account balances:

1.Access the Reconcile Account Balances function from the Reconciliation group under the Transactions menu in the General Ledger module.

2.In the Account ID field, enter the GL Account ID that you wish to reconcile. Alternatively, you may click the List box button to display a list of available GL Account IDs. Click the GL Account ID to select.

3.In the Period Range fields, define the date range of the journal entry details that you want to display in the Journal Entry grid for reconciliation for the selected GL Account ID. In the first field, select the fiscal year; then, in the From/To fields, select the period or periods.

4.Mark the Show reconciled transactions checkbox if you want to show in the grid only journal entry details of those journal entry transactions that were already marked as reconciled in the system; otherwise, leave the checkbox unmarked.

5.Click the Generate button to display in the Journal Entry grid the journal entry details that meet the conditions in the selection criteria.

6.In the Journal Entry grid, mark the corresponding Reconcile checkbox of each journal entry detail that have been verified as correct. Marking the Reconcile checkbox for a journal entry detail indicates that the transaction recorded in the system and the account's balance is correct.

7.When you are ready to save your changes, click the Save button; otherwise, click the Cancel button to disregard any changes.

Reconcile Account Balances

Reconcile Account Balances

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