4.4 Reconciling a Bank Account

Start in the Sample company.

Now let's get started with the exercise.

Note: You only have Accountant Tools because you are an accountant user. If Craig were going to reconcile the books himself, he would go to Transactions > Reconcile.

For the remainder of this exercise, you will need to refer to the [Sample Bank Statement.](https://www.fastandeasyqbo.com/SampleBankStatement.pdf)

Before moving on to reconciling, let's take a minute to review what you are looking at on this screen: 1\. The **beginning balance** is the ending balance from the last time you reconciled. It cannot be changed. 2\. The **statement ending balance** is from the bank statement, which you entered on the previous screen. 3\. If you discover you have entered the ending balance or the statement date incorrectly, you can click "Edit info" to change it.

4\. Next to each transaction is a circle. This will have a **blue checkmark** if the transaction has already been marked cleared (such as by processing bank feeds). 5\. When a transaction is checked, it is added to the **total payments or deposits**. 6\. The **cleared balance** is the beginning balance minus the payments and deposits. 7\. The **difference** is the statement ending balance minus the cleared balance. **The goal of reconciling is to check off transactions until the difference is zero.** 8\. Note that the transactions currently showing are only those dated on or before the statement ending date. You can **turn off this filter by clicking the X**, and you may need to do so if you have transactions that were added with an incorrect date. This is referred to as a "hidden" or "rogue" transaction.

In the remaining steps of this exercise, we are going to complete the reconciliation by checking each transaction until the difference is zero. If you already have any blue checkmarks, uncheck them individually, or uncheck all at once by clicking the circle at the top of the column. You will need to check them all, and then uncheck them all off. Just follow the prompts.

Next we will find and check all of the Checks.

One of the checks is missing a check number. We can be relatively certain that this is check #69 because it is for the same amount. If we had access to the bank records, we could view the check image and confirm this, but for the purposes of this exercise, we will assume that it is. Let's edit that transaction and add the check number.