How do I reconcile a bank statement? Bank reconciliation guide

“How do I reconcile a bank statement?” Open a reconciliation session for the cashbook and the month, enter the statement’s balances, upload the statement, let Auto Matching pair it with your cashbook lines, confirm or reject what it suggests, then explain whatever difference is left with a posting that fits it, before you print the audit pack and mark the session approved.

By the end, every line on your primary bank’s March 2026 statement is matched or named as an item that stays open, the RM 450 difference is explained rather than guessed at and the document that fixes it is posted, and the audit pack is ready for Friday’s sign-off. Plan on about 30 minutes the first time you do this for a cashbook; once the routine sticks, you will be in and out in 15. You will work mostly in the Bank Reconciliation applet, with brief detours to the Cashbook and Payment Voucher applets when the variance needs a fix.

One cashbook, one month, at a glance

The work runs across five short pages, in this order. Step 1 is on this page.

1. Pick the cashbook by the account number on your statement, and check it is wired to the right bank account: Master Data > Cashbook (Step 1, below).
2. Create the session, set the period and enter the four balances (Bank Reconciliation > New), then upload the statement and run Auto Matching, wait for it to finish, and confirm or reject the possible matches: Steps 2 to 7, Open the session and match the statement.
3. Name every difference that is left: Step 8, Find what the variance is.
4. Post only what needs posting: Step 8 continued, Post the fix that fits the variance: nothing for timing or a bank error, and a voucher, never a manual journal, where money genuinely moved and nothing was recorded.
5. Generate the three reports as the audit pack and mark the session approved: Steps 9 and 10, The audit pack and the sign-off. Approval is a sign-off label, not a lock.

Every page walks its steps on GadgetSphere’s numbers. The four words those pages lean on — session, cashbook line, open amount, confirmed link — are explained after Step 1.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd runs 22 consumer-electronics branches across Malaysia, with most receipts banking into the primary-bank account for each store. This morning the March 2026 statement for the Klang Valley branch 01 cashbook (GS-KV-01) landed in your inbox. The bank says the closing balance is RM 47,200; BigLedger says RM 47,650. The RM 450 gap has to be explained, the reconciliation has to be closed, and the audit pack has to sit on the finance manager’s desk before Friday.

Reading this guide against your own books

Everything below is worked on GadgetSphere’s numbers so that each step has something concrete in it. None of those values are yours. Before Step 1, write down your own four:

• Which cashbook. The guide says GS-KV-01. Yours is the cashbook whose Account Number on its Details tab is the account number printed on your statement — that field is what ties a cashbook to a real bank account, so match on it rather than on a name that looks familiar. Get this wrong and you will reconcile another branch: the cashbook is fixed when the session is created and cannot be changed on screen afterwards without deleting the session.
• Which period. The guide says 1–31 March 2026. Yours is the first and last day of the month your statement covers.
• Your two closing balances. The guide says RM 47,650 on the BigLedger side and RM 47,200 on the bank’s. Yours are whatever Step 4 and your statement say, and which of the two is larger is the first thing Step 8 uses — so note the direction, not just the size of the gap.
• Which accounts and settlement methods. The guide posts to EXPENSE-BANK-CHARGES through a bank-transfer settlement method. Yours are your own chart’s equivalents, and Step 1 is where you find out which settlement methods your branch actually uses.

Before you start

• The Chart of Accounts is set up and your sales, purchase, and POS (Point of Sale) documents are posting cleanly. See the Chart of Accounts Setup Guide if you are not sure.
• The cashbook for the branch you are reconciling exists in the Cashbook applet. For this guide, the cashbook code is GS-KV-01 and it points to your primary-bank current account.
• All settlement methods used by Receipt Voucher (Internal), Payment Voucher (Internal), and in-store POS terminals for GS-KV-01 already post to that same cashbook. Step 1 checks this.
• The company timezone is set to Asia/Kuala_Lumpur in the Organisation applet. Reconciliation uses this to decide which transactions fall inside March 2026.
• The February 2026 reconciliation for GS-KV-01 exists with the right closing balances, so the March opening balances have something to inherit (BigLedger pre-fills them from the cashbook’s most recent session).
• Your March 2026 bank statement file is downloaded and ready, in either your primary bank’s native format or the generic CSV (Comma-Separated Values) format.
• You are a member of the GS-KV-01 cashbook (Cashbook applet > Members tab) — the Bank Reconciliation create screen only lists cashbooks you are a member of — and your user holds the Bank Reconciliation, Cash Statement and Cashbook Transaction Line permissions your administrator assigned through the Permission Wizard. Roles are whatever your tenant named them; the permissions are what count.

Step 1: Confirm the cashbook is wired to the right bank account

Master Data > Cashbook

Open the Cashbook applet and find GS-KV-01. Check three things before you touch the reconciliation screen.

First, the cashbook’s company is GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd (GS), the branch is Klang Valley 01, the currency is Malaysian Ringgit (RM), and the linked General Ledger account reads CASH-PRI-KV01 (cash, primary bank, KV branch 01).

Second, open the Settlement Method listing (it is a separate menu item in the Cashbook applet, not a tab on the cashbook) and filter it to GS-KV-01’s branch. Every method the branch uses — the POS card terminal, the POS cash drawer, the bank-transfer method your accounts clerks pick on a Receipt Voucher (Internal) or a Payment Voucher (Internal) — has a Cashbook field on its Details tab, and each one should read GS-KV-01. If any of them point to a different cashbook, the receipts will never appear on this reconciliation and the variance hunt will lead you in circles.

Third, open the Weightage Configuration tab and confirm there is an ACTIVE configuration. Without it, the auto-matcher falls back to its built-in rule — equal weights, and an automatic link only when the amount is exact and the payee name is near-identical — so almost everything ends up as a possible match instead of a confirmed one.

Fix anything wrong here before moving on. A misrouted settlement method is the single most common reason a reconciliation refuses to close, and its sign is receipts in the branch’s daily takings report that are missing from this cashbook.

Bank reconciliation: a few terms to get straight

• Reconciliation session — one row that holds the work for a single cashbook over a single date range. It carries the four balances (your opening and closing, the bank’s opening and closing) and is what you create, fill, and finally mark Reviewed and Approved.
• Cashbook line vs. cash statement line — a cashbook line is what BigLedger thinks happened: it is written when a Receipt Voucher, Payment Voucher, POS settlement, Cash Transfer or Cash Adjustment reaches FINAL (the adjustment posts nothing to the ledger). A manual journal writes none, which decides what you post in Step 8. A cash statement line is what the bank says happened (one row imported from the bank file). Reconciliation pairs the two.
• Open amount — how much of a line is still unexplained. Every cashbook line and every bank statement line starts with its full value open, and each match you save subtracts the matched amount from both sides. A line whose open amount has reached zero is accounted for; every line still carrying one is what Step 8 investigates.
• Confirmed link vs. possible link — a confirmed link is a saved pairing between a cashbook line and a statement line. A possible link is a candidate the auto-matcher found but is not confident enough to save on its own, so it parks the suggestion for you to review and confirm.

Next: Steps 2 to 7 — open the session and match the statement.

If the stored closing is older than your fix

For later: if Report 1 still shows a variance after every line is matched and the greyed Calculated line on Details agrees with the bank, post nothing to clear it. The reports start from a closing stored on the session, which can be older than your last fix (Step 4); what to do about it is with the fix.

What success looks like

Open the session’s Details tab — for GadgetSphere, March 2026 on GS-KV-01 — and check that the stored Cash Book Transaction Closing Balance agrees with the greyed Calculated line beneath it, or that the pack records what your team did about the difference. Then open Report 3 and name every line on its unmatched sections, and check that Report 1’s Variance / discrepancy reads RM 0. Open lines are allowed if you can name them; the two endings say why.

Then check the pack itself: the session Status carries the label your team uses for a finished month (Reviewed and Approved if you used the full chain), and the bank statement file, Report 1, Report 2, Report 3 and any document you posted are together wherever your team keeps month-end evidence. If one of those is missing, or there is a line on Report 3 you cannot name, you are not done yet.

Common mistakes

Related documentation

A reconciliation reads what other screens wrote, and changes what some of them may do next. Five relationships are worth knowing before you need them.

• What has to be right first. Every cashbook line here exists because a settlement method named GS-KV-01 and a background job wrote the line after the document reached FINAL; a misrouted method or a failed job leaves the document FINAL with no line here. Trace Document in the Financial Report applet writes one document’s missing line; the Data Fix applet’s Cashbook › Missing Cashbook tab does it for a date range of cash bills, receipt and payment vouchers and cash transfers.
• Its sibling, and when to use which. This reconciliation ties the cashbook to the bank. A second tie — the cashbook to the ledger — compares the cashbook’s closing on Cash Level with CASH-PRI-KV01 on the trial balance (Reviewing a Set of Books, Step 2). They fail differently. A manual journal to CASH-PRI-KV01 moves the ledger and writes no cashbook line; a Cash Adjustment writes a cashbook line and no journal. Either one breaks one tie and leaves the other clean, so a month is closed on both.
• What it changes elsewhere. A matched voucher’s amount is locked, voiding it is not, and the session’s status label locks nothing (Step 10) — the fiscal period lock in Chart of Account does that.
• What breaks when the routing is wrong. A POS settlement method pointed at the wrong cashbook moves the day’s takings with it: this reconciliation is short, the other cashbook carries takings nobody expects, and the till’s Z Report — summed from the bills themselves — still looks right (POS reports). The two cashbooks disagree with their bank statements by the same amount in opposite directions.
• What it pairs with in practice. The two repairs above, and the month-end lock. Reconcile every cashbook, tie each to its GL code, then lock the month, in that order.