Reconciling Your Bank Account

Reconciliation is the monthly habit that proves your books match reality: you take the bank statement, check off everything that cleared, and when the difference reads $0.00 you know the account is right. GoodBooks keeps it to one screen, and it's included on every plan.

Left menu: Bank Reconciliation.

Before you start: catch the account up

Reconciling goes fastest when the account is already current — especially the small stuff on the statement you haven't recorded yet: bank service charges, interest earned, that forgotten debit card lunch. No harm if you miss something, though: enter it in the register whenever you discover it, and it appears on the reconciliation screen when you come back to it.

Starting

Click New Reconciliation and enter three things:

The Beginning Balance works like the paper process: on your very first reconciliation of an account, enter the beginning balance printed on the bank statement. From then on it's filled in automatically — the ending balance from your last completed reconciliation carries forward, and it can't be edited (that's the chain of custody that makes reconciliation mean something).

Your opening-balance entries never appear in the list. The bank statement's beginning balance already stands in for them, so there is nothing to tick. Checks and deposits that were still outstanding when you started on GoodBooks do appear, and you clear them as they show up on a statement.

Checking things off

You get one list of the account's unreconciled transactions — deposits in green (+), payments in red (−) — with a sticky Summary panel on the right. Go down the bank statement and tick the checkbox on each transaction that appears on it. Every tick is saved instantly, so you can stop anytime and pick the reconciliation back up later from the list (Continue).

The summary does the classic math as you go:

Beginning Balance + Cleared Deposits − Cleared Payments = Cleared Balance Statement Balance − Cleared Balance = Difference

Transactions dated after the statement date are shown greyed out at the bottom for reference — leave them for next month. Only check off items that are actually on this statement.

Online gifts and card payments arrive as one deposit per processor payout, matching the net amount the bank received — so they check off against the statement line-for-line, and a deposit batch always shows as a single line no matter how many funds it touches.

Finishing

When the Difference reads $0.00 (it turns green: "Balanced — ready to complete"), the Complete Reconciliation button unlocks. Completing:

• Locks every cleared transaction as Reconciled — they get a green check in the register and can no longer be voided or corrected.
• Snapshots the reconciliation as a permanent read-only report (cleared items, totals, and who completed it).

A completed reconciliation can't be edited, so double-check the difference is genuinely zero, not forced there by ticking something that didn't really clear.

After completing, you can attach the bank statement PDF to the reconciliation — it's filed automatically in your document storage under Bank Statements, and a paperclip on the reconciliation list gets you back to it at audit time.

A completed reconciliation also has a Print Report button: a clean one-page report with your organization, the account, the statement and completion dates, the summary math, and the list of cleared transactions. Print it or save it as a PDF for the binder; auditors ask for exactly this.

Undoing a completed reconciliation

If a completed reconciliation turns out to be wrong, open it and click Undo Reconciliation (or use the undo button next to it on the list). Its cleared transactions are unlocked and show as uncleared again, and the reconciliation is deleted, so you can redo that month. An attached bank statement stays in your documents.

• Only the most recent completed reconciliation for an account can be undone. To go further back, undo them one at a time, newest first.
• If a later reconciliation for the account is in progress, delete it first.
• Undoing is recorded in the activity log.

Good to know

• Unchecked items carry forward automatically. An outstanding check that hasn't cleared simply appears again next month — nothing to do.
• Voided transactions never appear on the clearing screen.
• If the difference won't zero out, the usual suspects: a bank fee or interest line you haven't entered yet (enter it in the register, then check it off here), a transposed amount, or a statement line that belongs to next month's reconciliation.
• Reconcile monthly, when the statement arrives. It takes minutes when you're current and hours when you're twelve months behind.