Every couple of weeks I download the bank account and tag off against invoices etc. However, I also need to mark off invoices as paid at the time they are paid. This action generates a payment item in the bank which means I can’t download the bank feed, as it would contain a duplicate item.
I need a system that allows me to mark off invoices (sales and purchase) as they are paid via debit card/ bank transfer etc., and then use bank tagging to match off all other bank items. Is this possible?
The problem is when you import your statement the software has no way of knowing for sure that a given transaction on your bank statement is related to a payment you’ve manually marked off from the invoice. The descriptions will be different, the date may well be different, so only the amount can be used to relate the two. When you import your statement it will throw up any items already there with a matching date and amount so you have the option to skip over it.
After importing the statement you’d usually run the bank reconcile tool and manually comb over the statement to remove any of the new untagged entries already accounted for.
Bank feeds largely solve this problem as they come in daily so you can just do everything from the bank. Unfortunately right now only Barclays support automated bank feeds.