When you're reconciling a bank account, an out of balance amount tells you that something isn't quite right. So you need to work out what's gone wrong.

Checking your reconciliation

Here are some things to look out for:

• did you type the correct figure in the Closing Statement Balance field? You need to type the closing balance from your bank statement, not the opening balance.
• did you enter the correct date (that of the closing balance from your bank statement) in the Bank Statement Date field? An incorrect date may prevent some transactions from appearing in the list.
• did you select all the transactions that appear on the bank statement? If not, some transactions might not have been accounted for in the reconciled balance.
• did you select, by mistake, a transaction that didn’t appear on your bank statement? If yes, you need to deselect this transaction.
• did you record all bank charges and bank interest entries that appear on the bank statement? If not, you need to record them and select them for reconciliation.

• has the opening balance of the bank account been changed? If it has, you'll need to change it back to its original value. You might need to restore an early backup to check the account's original opening balance.

• has a previously reconciled transaction been deleted or reversed? If it has, re-enter it then select it in the Reconcile Accounts window when performing the reconciliation.

Checking the Calculated Statement Balance 

If you've checked all the things listed above and your reconciliation still doesn't balance, it might relate to an incorrectly displayed Calculated Statement Balance in the Reconcile Accounts window. This is a rare issue and only affects what's displayed in this window, and doesn't impact your company file data. Here's a quick check to see if this is your issue:

Undoing a reconciliation

If your issue relates to a previous reconciliation (perhaps a transaction was incorrectly reconciled, or a wrong date was used) and you haven't been able to fix these issues, try undoing the last reconciliation. All transactions for that period will return to an unreconciled state, and you'll need to reconcile them again using the previous bank statement.