Hello,
I have been using QuickFile since 2013 and over the years the amount of money that QuickFile shows I have in my bank doesn’t add up to what I actually have in my bank account.
I have heard about Reconciling, but ave no idea how to do it and we are talking loads of money different. I mean several thousands of pounds over the years. It is so much that I have to do something about it now but simply have no idea where or how to start and am daunted by the prospect.
Please your support is appreciated. And if one of the support team could look at my account and see if I have some automatic feature that needs resetting that would be helpful now or in early January.
Wishing you all a very happy and blessed Christmas.
Basically all that the reconcile tool does is help you check your opening and closing balances for a particular month/whatever period in an account in QuickFile against the same values from your bank statement. Step one of any reconciliation is to go back through your bank statements and find the earliest point where the balance in QuickFile started to disagree with that on your statements - you can do this very quickly with a kind of “binary search”, if you know it was correct on date X and wrong on date Y then look at the date half way between the two and repeat until you find the first discrepancy. Once you’ve found that, fix it by adding it removing transactions, then repeat the whole process (as the fix will have adjusted all later balances too). There’s not really any more of a shortcut than that…
First, did you actually start your Quickfile account with the correct balance?
Reconciliation isn’t the big deal that it was in the days when everything was paid by cheque. All you are doing is looking to see if your balance is what you expected and if not, why not. If done with each bank statement this should never become onerous. At this point I would also suggest looking at the Cheque Holding Account to ensure that you haven’t mislaid any of those pesky pieces of paper that some people still insist on using.
With QF the most likely reason is that invoices (sale or purchase) have been physically tagged as paid and then new transactions created automatically when uploading the bank statement.
I can probably bet that you have marked something as paid and used bank as the payment method at some point and it’s added a transaction to your bank account instead of actually tagging the bank entries to an invoice. You’ve probably done this a number of times and as a result its added entries that were never there to begin with.
One of the reasons I don’t like QF allowing you to manually tag an invoice from the invoice screen and allowing you to select the bank account.
But as a matter of course you should have been checking the balance matches with your bank on a monthly basis and this would never have happend.
If you can’t find all the wrong entries now your only option is to add a bank entry called correction and either debit or credit to adjust the balance. Its not right and won’t look professional but after years of not checking the balance what else can you do.
I changed the default to Cheque Holding Account for this very reason. The only time I am likely to manually flag an invoice as paid is if a customer pays by cheque.
Thank you all for all of your advice. I am looking at it now that I am back from my Christmas New Year break.
I did start the account with the correct amount in the bank and it was all okay for the first 6 months but it looks like every expense has been added to the banking rather than deducted from it. Scratching my head but hopefully will work it out.