I’m having trouble as debit card transactions are shown on our bank statement with the date a few days after the transaction was carried out. This is making it difficult to reconcile QuickFile against the bank statement, and our bank insists it is “standard practice for all banks and building societies”.
One debit card transaction was carried out on the last day of our financial year, but appeared on our account two days later. So should I include the transaction in this year’s accounts or change the date to match the bank statements (which I’m hesitant to do, but one of our other directors thinks is the best course of action) and put the transaction in next year’s accounts.
The date of the bank transaction shouldn’t affect your accounts as it’s the invoice date which is taken into account rather than when money was received.
I would keep all the dates in your QuickFile bank to match your actual bank statement to avoid confusion and to be able to match everything up
I would always work from the dates on the bank statement. For card purchases where the goods are delivered and paid for at source (this accounts for a great many things) just tag it straight from your bank statement. You can lodge the purchase manually and offset the payment by a couple of days, but you’re really making a lot of extra work for yourself.
If you import your statement and tag from there you’ll never need to do any bank reconciliation.
I enter purchases from receipts/invoices rather than by uploading bank statements. Do you think it would be better to import the bank statement then create purchase records from there?
For 95% of purchases this is what I would do. If for example you buy a computer from Dell (or any large value item) and goods are provided on a 30 day invoicing term, you can enter the invoice and then mark as paid from the bank later when you’ve settled the invoice. That way you’r tracking the liability. If you’re buying some stationery from Tesco and paying by card it’s really overkill entering the invoice and flagging as paid when the card transaction leaves your account (which is rarely more than a couple of days).
