First of all, if you aren’t using the bank account reconciliation feature in Sage 50 you should be, unless of course you don’t want to make your life easier. In that case feel free to keep doing them manually. For the rest of you, keep reading.
Here’s an overview of the whole process. To start a reconciliation, go to the Tasks menu and choose Account Reconciliation. Or click on the Banking tab on the left side the the Sage 50 window and then click the Reconcile Accounts button. When the reconciliation window opens, select the account you want to reconcile from the list at the top of the window, and enter the statement ending date. At the bottom of the window, enter the ending balance from the bank statement. If you need to enter interest or bank charges, click the double-arrow button to expand that section, then enter them in the corresponding fields.
Now you just need to check the box next to each item that cleared on this statement. When everything is correctly marked as cleared, the unreconciled difference in the bottom left corner will be $0.00.
Of course, even though that is simple in theory, in real life it can be frustrating. So here are some tips that should make it easier.
- Sort by any column. Clicking on any column heading will sort based on that column. Click it again to reverse the sort order. This way you can easily locate a transaction by amount, date, or payee/description.
- Find Button – If sorting doesn’t do the trick for you, click the Find button at the top of the window. Then type in whatever you want to search for. It could be a check number, amount, date or payee. Just remember that this is a simple text search so you will need to type it exactly as it appears on screen. If you are looking for March 15th 2015, you need to enter Mar 15, 2015 not 3/15/15. Mar 15 would also work since it will find partial matches. And for an amount you must include commas.
- Multiple Button – You can clear a whole series of transactions at once with the Multiple button. Choose the transaction type and then enter a starting and ending reference (usually a check number) or date range.
- Import Button – If you can download a statement from your bank in .OFX format, you can import it here to automatically clear matching transactions.
- Add New Button – If you are missing a transaction, the Add New button gives you shortcuts to enter certain types of transactions. But you aren’t limited to those. While older version of Sage 50/Peachtree made you close the reconciliation to enter new transactions, now you can enter new transactions with the reconciliation still open. When you return to the bank rec, the data will automatically refresh.
- Clear Button – gives the choice of clearing or un-clearing all transactions. If your reconciliations are as simple as “clear all” you probably wouldn’t bother reading this. But if you are having problems and just want to start over, the “un-clear all” option is a big time saver.
- Checks and Bank Debits/Deposits and Bank Credits – In the upper left corner, you will see the number of cleared items along with the the total dollar amount. When you are having trouble getting your account reconciled, this will help you narrow down you search. Your bank statement will give you these same numbers, so look to see if your total cleared checks matches the banks, and do the same with deposits. That can tell you where to look for the problem. But keep in mind that void checks can throw this number off. When you void a check, Sage 50 enters a matching negative check and marks them both as cleared. The negative check gets lumped in with the Deposits and Bank Credits. That means both your cleared checks and cleared deposits will be higher than the bank’s number by 1 transaction and the amount of the voided check.
If you are having trouble matching up your deposits, you may have your customer receipts incorrectly grouped into deposits. The Bank Deposit Report which is found in the Account Reconciliation report group will show you exactly which receipts are included in each deposit. You can then edit the deposit ticket IDs in the Receive Money window (formerly called Receipts) so that your deposit amounts will match those on your bank statement.
