Welcome to our fourth weekly tip on preparing for year end - well done if you've completed the first three checks already!

⚖️ Bank Reconciliations

It's time to ensure that your transactions are up-to-date and that bank reconciliations have been completed and are balancing. Hopefully you'll have completed your January bank reconciliation and soon February too - but don't panic if you've still a way to go. 

✅ Check:

• Ensure that all payments, receipts and bank transfers have been recorded to date.
• If you're behind with bank reconciliations, we recommend completing these on a monthly basis. This means that if you do come across a discrepancy, you only have one months worth of data to look back on.
• Ensure the Reconcile All Banks report has been completed to date and balances.

Below are two useful guides and tutorials on the bank reconciliation process.

• Reconcile - Ticking off transactions against the bank statement
• Reconcile All Banks - Running a comprehensive bank reconciliation report (your auditor will require this at year end!)

Don't panic if you have a discrepancy, the following guide will take you step-by-step through the process to identify and rectify this.: How do I approach looking for a bank reconciliation discrepancy?

👉 Unpresented Items

It is also important to remember that after reconciling your bank statements and running Reconcile All Banks you should not only be checking that A = B (e.g. there is no reconciliation difference) but also that your unpresented items are correct.

Unpresented items are payments that have been made or receipts that have been received but do not yet appear on the bank statement. The most common reason for this is the use of cheques - e.g. a cheque written by the council and sent out on the 15th March, that was subsequently cashed on the 10th April.

As the payment has been made by the council it will appear in their cashbook, however the cheque has not cleared the bank as at 31st March and will therefore be included in the Year End bank reconciliation as an unpresented item.

✅ Check:

• If you have values for unpresented payments or receipts on your Reconcile All Banks report, you can see what transactions make up these totals by using the Filter button: How Can I View Uncashed Payments & Receipts
• You should review your unpresented items regularly to check that they are correct or whether there are errors, duplicates or historic items that can now be written off: How do I cancel an old cheque?

👇 You can also watch a tutorial on this check.