Reconciling Holding Accounts

We have been using QF for just over 8 months and have adopted the “Holding Account” approach in collecting Cheque and Cash from our clients. We have been religiously entering invoices and assigning payments to either our cheque or cash holding accounts.
It is only now (I know we should have done it earlier) that we have noticed that the both holding accounts are nowhere near the magical figure of Zero, in fact quite the reverse. We have spent a deal of time checking invoices to make sure we have not missed any but only identified a couple of mistakes.
Can you please advise on where we are going wrong - It must be something obvious!

With a cheque holding account you’d typically make a payment in to the holding account when you receive a cheque, then take the cheque(s) to the bank and deposit it/them. When the deposit appears on your current account statement you tag that as a “transfer” from the holding account to the bank account. Thus the balance on the holding account at any given point in time represents the total value of cheques you have received but have not yet cleared into your current account.

Likewise when you receive cash you mark the invoice payments in to the cash account, then when you pay in cash at the bank you tag that as a transfer from cash to current account.

How are you currently tagging things when you deposit cheques/cash into your bank account?

Apologise for not replying earlier…
Up to now we were tagging the chq/ cash deposits as transfers via an auto-tag but today I stripped out all cheques and cash IN and reapplied the transfer by bulk tagging. It improved the results but not significantly.
The cheque stands at -500 odd and the cash is just under +2000. We have banked all cheques and cash.
Obviously there is mistakes but it is where to look? Is it too many invoices not assigned properly?

Can you work it back to a logical date where the balance can easily be reconciled against the invoices outstanding? Then possible work forward from there?

One thing you could do in future to make the reconciliation process easier is to add the cheque number in the payment notes. That way you can always go through the list of cheques to see which one’s are missing.

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