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Hope4Tex
October 20, 2021
Question

Dealing with old transactions in the Reconcile window

  • October 20, 2021
  • 1 reply
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Hello, I am a new bookkeeper for a small business and I am running into an issue I hope the community can help me with. Their accountant wanted the company's books to be reconciled starting in 2020. I have reconciled what matched the bank statements but there were customer payments recorded in the books that didn't match the deposits. I now have a handful on transactions lingering in the reconcile screen that I'm not sure how to deal with as deleting them will show the customer is unpaid and my client is sure they have paid even though these transaction do not align with the statements. Does anyone know how I should handle these transactions? I also have lingering Amex transactions dating all the way back to 2017 that I'm unsure how to clean out without effecting anything the accountant has done in the past. 

    1 reply

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    Pete_Mc
    October 28, 2021

    There are two common gotchas I've seen before.  First, the bank may show a deposit which is actually multiple checks that went in at the same time.  And you are seeing the actual recording into the bank register when the payment was received.

     

    The other is similar, where someone has made the deposit AND then applied payment to an invoice and it now shows as a second deposit.

     

    I hate to ask...  But how far along in the reconciliation are you.  You can try and go through the older unreconciled items and delete the duplicates if you are sure you've found them.  But remember if a Reconciled item is the one that has been deleted, you'll need to re-reconcile to catch the closing balance difference. 

     

    If at all possible, unreconcile what you've done so far and make sure you have no open items before you move on.  It is much easier to find these issues in the month they occurred than going back months later.

    (I forget if the Online version let you UNreconcile?)  And if you can't, you'll have to make come correcting Journal Entries...   But it's always cleanest if you can figure out the duplicates or combined deposits each month.

     

    One other note if you're new....  Be sure to learn out the Undeposited Funds Acct works if your company is using it.  (It is the default and most do.)

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