Reconciling your bank account is a common process that you're need to complete regularly. There's no right or wrong answer to how often you should do this. It usually depends on the number of transactions that going through your accounts. Remember it's much harder to reconcile large numbers of transactions.
You can reconcile from a paper bank statement, download your bank transactions directly using Sage bank feeds, or import a file from your bank's e-Banking service.
Why reconcile?
Regularly reconciling you bank account allows you to:
- Check that all transaction have been entered into Sage 200 and therefore reported in your accounts.
- Check that transactions have been entered correctly.
- Identify any transactions in your bank account that shouldn't be there, as a security measure.
- Keep track of cash flow and financial position.
Set up your bank account
If you are setting up new bank account details we advise you to reconcile any opening balances first. This is to make sure that your opening statement balance in Sage 200 matches the balance on the statement your have received from your bank.
Using online banking services
Instead of reconciling from a paper statement, Sage 200 supports different online banking services to help you with your bank reconciliation.
You can use either Sage bank feeds to download transactions directly, or use your bank's e-Banking service.
Set up Sage bank feeds for bank reconciliation
You can use our secure Sage bank feeds service to download bank account transactions and compare them to your Sage 200 transactions
This reduces the time that you spend entering transactions, simplifies your bank reconciliation and ensures your accounts are up to date and accurate.
To set up Sage bank feeds, see Set up Sage bank feeds.
Set up e-Banking for bank reconciliation
If your bank's e-Banking service provides an electronic statement reconciliation, you can download a file with details of transactions using your banking software, and then import this into Sage 200.
To set up e-Banking for bank reconciliation, see Set up e-Banking.
Reconcile your bank statement
You'll see different screens here, depending on whether you will reconcile your bank account using a paper statement, e-Banking, or bank feeds.
Reconcile using bank feeds
You can use the bank feeds service to:
- Download transactions from your online bank accounts.
- Match your downloaded bank transactions to those in Sage 200.
Reconcile using e-banking
You import the file from your bank and match these to the transactions in Sage 200. You can:
- Match transactions automatically to save you time. You can match by reference, date or both.
- Match transactions individually.
- Delete imported transactions if you partially reconciled for a day.
Reconcile from a paper statement
Transactions are shown in two lists. You select the transactions that match your bank statement and move them to a reconciled list. This makes it easier to find transactions as you progress through the reconciliation.
Unreconcile transactions
You can unreconcile transactions that have been previously reconciled in error.
Transactions are displayed according to their transaction date and not when they were reconciled. The Page No column indicates which bank reconciliation a transaction was included in.
Once unreconciled the statement balance is updated and the transaction will appear in the bank reconciliation screen again.
Delete reconciled transactions
Once you complete a bank reconciliation you can delete the transactions from Sage 200.
Deleting reconciled transactions is a housekeeping process you can do on a regular basis to make sure that the volume of transactions on a bank account doesn't become too big.
When you delete reconciled transactions, the value of the deleted transactions is added to the bank account's opening balance. This maintains a running bank balance on the account.
Once you have deleted reconciled transactions they are removed from a number of Sage 200 screens. You won't be able to see the details of the transaction on the Account Enquiry or Bank Account Transaction Enquiry screens or workspaces.
However, you can see the deleted transactions on the following screens:
- Customer Transaction Enquiry - if the transaction was received from a customer.
- Supplier Transaction Enquiry - if the transaction was a payment to a supplier.
- Nominal Account Transaction Enquiry - you must know which nominal account the transaction was posted to.