Bank Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the check that everything else depends on. Each month I compare every transaction recorded in your accounting platform against the actual statements from your bank and credit card accounts, line by line, until the two agree exactly.

That matching process is where problems surface. A charge that posted twice. A check that was written but never cleared. A supplier who billed for the same invoice in two different months. A subscription that renewed at a higher rate than you agreed to. A deposit recorded in the wrong month, quietly moving income from one quarter into another. None of these announce themselves. They sit in your records looking ordinary until someone compares them against what the bank actually says happened.

Unreconciled books are usually not wrong in obvious ways. They are wrong in small ways that compound. A balance that is off by a few hundred dollars in March is off by the same amount every month after that, and by the time it matters, tracing it back means working through a year of transactions instead of a month.

I work directly in QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Wave. Whichever platform you already use, reconciliation happens there, in the records you already have. There is nothing new to learn and no migration to sit through.

If your accounts have not been reconciled in a while, that is a normal starting point rather than a problem. Bringing the books current is scoped separately from ongoing monthly work, so you can see exactly what catching up involves before committing to anything continuing.

Once you are current, this becomes a monthly rhythm you do not have to think about. You hear from me when something needs a decision from you. Otherwise the accounts are reconciled, the balances are right, and the numbers you are looking at are numbers you can trust.