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Reconciliation is an important step in small business accounting. It involving comparing the transactions listed in your books with those in listed in your bank accounts. The general idea is to ensure that the two are the same. If your books show one total and your bank accounts show a different total, you know there’s a discrepancy somewhere. So, how do you fix discrepancies identified from reconciliation in Quickbooks?

Run a Reconciliation Discrepancy Report

You should first run a reconciliation discrepancy report, which reveals all transactions that have been changed since the last time you reconciled them, sorted by statement date. To run this report, log in to your Quickbooks account and select Reports > Banking > Reconciliation Discrepancy. Next, choose your account and select “OK.” You can then review the reconciliation discrepancy report to see what’s missing.

Run a Missing Checks Report

Intuit also recommends running a missing checks report to help identify and fix discrepancies. This is also access within the Reports > Banking menu. Instead of choosing “Reconciliation Discrepancy,” however, you’ll need to select “Missing Checks.” After selecting “Missing Checks,” choose your account and select “OK.” You can then review the report while searching for transactions that don’t match those listed on your bank statement.

Run a Transaction Detail Report

A third report that you should run is a transaction detail report. This is found under Reports > Custom Reports > Transaction Detail. Once you’ve accessed this area, click the “Display” tab and choose either “Date From” or  “Date To.” You can also filter the results based on account, last modified, date date from, or date to.  Select “OK” to run the report with the settings you just made.

Fixing Discrepancies

By running a reconciliation discrepancy report, a missing checks report, and a transaction detail report, you should be able to identify the problematic transaction or transactions that don’t match your bank statement. This is relatively straight-forward, as it involves modifying the transaction or transactions in your books to match your bank statement.

Reconciliation is arguably one of the most important steps in small business accounting. However, you’ll still need to fix any discrepancies that you find. As noted above, this is typically achieved by modifying the respective transaction or transaction. Once you’ve made the changes, run the three reports again to ensure your books and bank accounts match.

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!