I just noticed that my Current Account is £5 lower in Quickfile than that reported by the NatWest statements. My accounts have been linked to Quickfile since I started in 2017. I reconcile the account every couple of months, to ensure that everything is OK, and at no time has the reconciliation shown a discrepancy.
Turns out the problem was two entries of a £5 monthly bank charge in May 2017. I can reconcile any account since then in Quickfile and it tells me that everything is perfect, because apparently it doesn’t check the opening and closing balances when reconciling, it just looks at the difference between them.
This is the way the reconcilliation tool works. When you enter the figures into the tool for the opening and closing balances it checks the transactions between these figures and dates to make sure it matches. It would have been picked up when you reconciled in May 2017.
The reconcilliation tool checks that the difference between two dates is the same and since the descrepency happened in 2017 it wouldn’t have shown since.
OK, I still maintain this is broken, but if you designed it to work that way, I don’t suppose I can change your mind.
I’m pretty certain that every previous accounting package I have used checked the opening and closing balances as well as the difference between them.
Quickfile has no knowledge of opening and closing balances though so it can’t check them. The way the bank accounts work is the current balance is just the original opening balance plus or minus every transaction to date.
To reconcile a period in the middle you enter the opening and closing balances from your bank account statement and Quickfile will tell you if they differ to what it has calculated the difference should be for the period but it can’t tell you if the opening balance is incorrect based on a previous period.
I’d be surprised if the previous accounts package you used checked the opening and closing balance as what would it check against?
I think perhaps my previous packages enforced reconciliation as a linear process, so each reconciliation started from where the previous one left off, thus the opening and closing balances could be verified by the package.
You ought to think about implementing something similar, I think.
Maybe, but then if you don’t want to do this then there is no point forcing someone to suddenly reconcile 10 years of bank statements just to check the last month.
Even without using the reconciling tool a check of your current balance by just checking against your statement would have told you it was off anyway then you’d just go back to find when it was last correct. I’m not sure there’s really a problem to be solved here?
Because the discrepancy was small and exactly £5, I missed it when it first happened, then I guess I was relying on reconciliation after that and just glancing at the balances. I would probably have spotted a larger discrepancy, or one with more digits varying, you know?
You could make it a user-selectable choice, of course, or have the reconciliation default to a linear process if a start date isn’t specified, or something. To me, that would make your software better, but obviously the final choice is with you.
