Reconciling Accounts

Reconciling accounts in SEE Finance can be done through the use of statements or by just manually reconciling the records in the account's transaction register against a list of records from your financial institution.

Reconciling With Statements
Reconciling using statements in SEE Finance is a modern version of the old paper method where you compare the records in your checkbook to the records on your institution's paper statement. Reconciling accounts using statements is done by creating a replica of the institution's statement with its transactions and then comparing the institution's statement records to those of your account's transactions register. Using statements to reconcile an account can help quickly identify and adjust for any discrepancy between your records and your institution's by having both sets of records to compare and match. You can create a replica of your financial institution's statement in three different ways.

Option 1: You can create a replica of your financial institution's statement by downloading transactions from the institution for the statement period using Direct Connect downloads.

Option 2: You can create a replica of your financial institution's statement by importing a file from your institution's website that contains the transactions for the statement period (QFX, OFX, QIF or CSV files).

Option 3: You can create a replica of your financial institution's statement by manually creating the statement and then either manually entering the transactions into the statement or building the statement's list of transactions from the records in your account's transactions register using the Reconcile window that is accessed in the account's Statements View by clicking the "Reconcile" button.

See Creating Statements and Reconciling Accounts Using Statements for more details.

Reconciling Without Statements
Reconciling accounts can also be done by skipping the creation of statements altogether. You can simply open Reconcile window accessed in the account's Statements View by clicking the "Reconcile" button to view the account's transactions register. In the Reconcile window there is the top box labeled "Transactions" which is the records from the account's transactions register. The lower box labeled "Statement" is for the selected statement's records which will not be needed and can be hidden by pulling the slider bar between the two boxes down leaving only the "Transactions" box visible. Then you can simply go through the list of transactions marking them as reconciled as appropriate when compared to the records of your institution. Below the table of transactions are listings for "Account Balance", "Reconciled Balance" and "Unreconciled Balance" to help reconcile your account's records to those of the institution.

See Reconciling Accounts Without Statements for more details.

***Reconciling for the First Time***
When reconciling an account for the first time it is unnecessary to create a statement to cover all your past transactions. You can begin where you left off from your previous means of tracking your account's records (using a conservative estimate of the date where you left off). If for some reason transactions known to already be reconciled are not properly marked as reconciled you can quickly mark them as reconciled making the account up to date. Select the Transactions View for the account and then use the "Start" and "End" date selectors under the table of transactions to display only the date range of the transactions known to be reconciled. With only the known reconciled transactions shown, you can then select all of these transactions (press "Command a") and then select "Mark Selected Transaction(s) as Reconciled" from the Transactions menu ("Command Shift R"). Then you can begin reconciling your accounts using one of the methods described above.

Check out the links below to find out more information about reconciling accounts in SEE Finance.

Reconciling Accounts

See also