Open a bank reconciliation session and match the statement

Steps 2 to 7 of the bank reconciliation guide. You create the session for one cashbook and one month, enter the four balances, upload the bank’s statement, let Auto Matching pair it with your cashbook lines, and confirm or reject what it suggests. When you finish, you know the size and the direction of whatever difference is left, and that is what Step 8 works on.

Before this: Step 1, where you checked that the cashbook and its settlement methods point at the right bank account. GadgetSphere’s numbers carry on from there: the March 2026 statement for GS-KV-01, RM 47,200 at the bank against RM 47,650 in BigLedger.

1. Step 2: create the session for the cashbook.
2. Step 3: set the period and enter the four balances.
3. Step 4: create the session and check the calculated cashbook balance.
4. Step 5: upload the statement.
5. Step 6: run Auto Matching and wait for it to finish.
6. Step 7: confirm or reject the possible matches.

Step 2: Create the March 2026 reconciliation session for GS-KV-01

Bank Reconciliation > New

From the sidebar, open Bank Reconciliation. You should see February 2026 for GS-KV-01 near the top of the list (group the listing by cashbook if the list is long). Click New.

On the create form, pick Company GS and then the cashbook GS-KV-01. The cashbook list only shows cashbooks you are a member of — if GS-KV-01 is missing, that is the Members tab in the Cashbook applet, not a bug. Branch fills in from the cashbook you picked, which is where it always comes from: a branch saved under Default Selection does not change it.

Stop here for a moment and check the cashbook once more. It is immutable once the session is created — you cannot change it later without deleting the whole session — so getting this right now matters. If you picked the wrong one, close the form without saving and start again.

Once you are sure you have the right cashbook, you are ready to set the period.

If GS-KV-01 does not appear in the cashbook list, ask your administrator to add you as a member of that cashbook and to check your Bank Reconciliation permissions.

Step 3: Set the period and enter the four balances

Bank Reconciliation > (your new session) > Details

Set Opening Date to 1 March 2026 and Closing Date to 31 March 2026. The form refuses an Opening Date on or before February’s Closing Date (Opening date should be later than … based on the cashbook selected), which is the nudge that stops two sessions overlapping. The Name field auto-fills to March 2026 from the Opening Date. Leave it unless your team uses a different naming style.

Now the four balance fields. Cash Book Transaction Opening Balance is read-only and already filled with February’s cashbook closing balance — RM 41,830 for GS-KV-01. Treat that figure as a preview: it is the closing figure stored on February’s session, and when you click Create in Step 4 BigLedger works the opening out again from the cashbook lines themselves. Beneath Cash Statement Opening Balance there is a Prev Cash Stmt Closing Bal hint button that copies in February’s bank closing balance; click it and RM 41,830 lands on that side too.

Now type in the Cash Statement Closing Balance from your bank statement: RM 47,200. Leave Cash Book Transaction Closing Balance alone; it is read-only and will be calculated for you. Leave Status alone as well — a new session starts as Processing, and you change it only when the work is done (Step 10).

If the pre-filled opening balance is wrong, February’s session is wrong — its closing date is not 28 February 2026, or a February voucher was voided after the close. Fix February first; otherwise March inherits a bad opening balance.

Step 4: Create the session and check the calculated cashbook balance

Bank Reconciliation > (your new session) > Create, then open the session again from the listing

Click Create. At that moment BigLedger works out both cashbook figures from the cashbook lines, in your company’s Kuala Lumpur timezone: the opening is every active GS-KV-01 line dated before 1 March, and the closing is that opening plus every active line dated 1 to 31 March. Lines whose receipt, payment or POS settlement was voided are left out. The two results are stored on the session. After that, a background job refreshes them: every time a cashbook line on GS-KV-01 is written, voided or re-dated, BigLedger asks for a refresh, and a job that runs every 30 minutes works out the stored figures of every active session on that cashbook again. That job runs only where it is scheduled on your tenant; where it is not, the figures stay as they were at Create. The bank’s two figures are simply the ones you typed — nothing adds up the uploaded statement lines to check them.

Open the session again. You should now see your side: Cash Book Transaction Opening RM 41,830, Cash Book Transaction Closing RM 47,650. Compare against the bank side: Cash Statement Opening RM 41,830, Cash Statement Closing RM 47,200. Openings match. Closings disagree by RM 450 (47,650 minus 47,200). That is exactly the gap your finance manager flagged.

If the stored opening is not the RM 41,830 the create form showed you, the difference is a document dated in February or earlier that was posted, voided or re-dated after February’s figures were last worked out. February’s reports were drawn before it arrived, so look at February before you go further.

Your closing balance appears twice, and the two can drift apart. Beneath Cash Book Transaction Closing Balance there is a greyed line, Calculated Cash Book Transaction Closing Balance. The field holds the stored figure — worked out at Create, and again by the background job where it runs. The greyed line is worked out every time you open the session or return to its Details tab: the stored opening plus the period’s cashbook lines as they stand now. Today the two agree. They part company when a document dated inside the period is posted, voided or re-dated — and Step 8 may ask you to do exactly that. Where the job is scheduled they come back together within about half an hour; where it is not, they stay apart. The refresh icon beside the greyed line is greyed out too and does nothing when clicked, so waiting for the job is the only way the stored figure moves on its own. All three reports start from the stored figure, so whenever the two disagree, read the end of Step 8 before you trust a report.

Make a note: BigLedger thinks GS-KV-01 has RM 450 more than the bank does. The variance must therefore be either a cashbook line the bank has not honoured yet, or a bank charge the bank already took but you have not posted.

If your closing comes out wildly different from what you expected (more than the RM 450 you already know about), check whether a January or February voucher was back-dated into March. Fix the source date and re-save.

Step 5: Upload the March bank statement

Bank Reconciliation > (your session) > Upload Statement

Switch to the Upload Statement tab and open the upload form. Choose your bank’s layout from the Import Format list — BigLedger ships a parser per Malaysian bank export (several banks have a -01 / -02 variant for their different internet-banking layouts, and a Pdf variant for PDF statements). If your bank is not on the list, pick Default Format, download the template CSV from the form, and paste your statement into its columns.

Bank Statement Name pre-fills from the file name; rename it to something like 2026-03 Primary KV01 so future-you can find it again. Attach the statement file and upload. The file becomes a Cash Statement record for this session.

Open that Cash Statement and its View Statement tab, and scan the parsed rows. Each row shows the bank’s transaction date, payor, references, description, and amount. If the upload was rejected with The Headers Order Does Not Match The Expected Order, you exported a different layout from the format you chose — try the other numbered variant of the same bank, or fall back to Default Format. A PDF that comes back with No transactions found is a layout the parser does not know; export a CSV instead.

Once you can see your statement lines, you are ready to let BigLedger do the heavy matching.

If you used Default Format and some rows are missing, open Default Statement Helper, click the file, and read the Checking tab: it names the rows whose Transaction Date, Amount or Payee/Payor Name failed validation. Fix them in the CSV and upload again; rows with errors are never promoted into the reconciliation.

Step 6: Run Auto Matching and wait for it to finish

Bank Reconciliation > (your session) > Auto Matching > Run

Switch to the Auto Matching tab and click Run Automatching. Every button on the tab greys out while Processing Auto Matching is on. The matcher is now scoring every possible pairing of cashbook line to bank statement line using the weights you set up in Cashbook (amount, date, reference, payee), looking at cashbook lines from 90 days before your Opening Date to 90 days after your Closing Date so that a February receipt the bank only cleared in March can still find its partner.

Pairs that score at or above your threshold are saved as confirmed links. Pairs that score well but below the threshold are parked as possible links for you to review. Weak pairs are dropped. Unless you ticked one-to-one matching, it also looks for up to five open cashbook lines that add up to a single statement line — the shape a card-acquirer settlement usually has.

Wait until the buttons come back before doing anything else; running the reports while the matcher is still working will give you half-finished numbers. The screen re-checks the job after a minute and then every 30 seconds. When it is done, know that the tab shows no totals of its own. To see what is left, open Unmatched Txn Lines (under Cashbook Transaction Lines) and Unmatched Cash Stmt Lines (under Cash Statement Lines), or generate Report 3, and note how many lines are still open on each side before moving on.

If the buttons never come back, the background job failed before it could clear the flag. Ask your administrator to look at the job queue log; do not run the reports in the meantime.

Step 7: Confirm or reject the possible matches

Bank Reconciliation > (your session) > Auto Matching > Unmatched Txn Lines — then Manual Matching > Reconcile for the ones you reject

You review the matcher’s suggestions where it made them, which is on the Auto Matching tab, not on Manual Matching. Open Unmatched Txn Lines: it lists every cashbook line that still has an open amount, and against each one the statement line the matcher thought was the likely partner but was not confident enough to link on its own. Walk down the list.

For each row, eyeball four things: date within a day or two, amount matches to the cent, reference looks right (your receipt or payment number on one side and the bank’s transfer reference on the other), and the payor or payee name is recognisable. If all four agree, click Add (or Reconcile on the bank-side listing). The possible link becomes a confirmed link and the row disappears.

If the candidate is clearly wrong (for example, the matcher paired your RM 1,200 supplier payment with a RM 1,200 customer receipt because the amount was identical and nothing else on the statement line carried data), leave it and match it by hand instead: on the Manual Matching tab’s Reconcile sub-tab, click the cashbook line, pick the right statement line under Matched Bank Statement Lines, and click Reconcile. Partial matches are allowed — a RM 1,000 statement line can be settled by three cashbook lines.

Work top to bottom. Most months for GS-KV-01 will leave you with a handful of true exceptions, plus the RM 450 you are still hunting.

If you confirm a wrong pair by accident, go to Manual Matching > Unreconcile, find the line, and Undo Reconcile before you continue; the link is deleted and the open amount goes back on both sides.

Next: Step 8, find what the variance is.

What success looks like for this part

On the session’s Details tab, the stored closing balance and the greyed Calculated line agree, and the Auto Matching buttons are back. Unmatched Txn Lines and Unmatched Cash Stmt Lines list only lines you have looked at, and you can say how big the difference left is and which side is larger.

Common mistakes in this part

Related documentation

• Bank reconciliation guide, the whole task, with its success check.
• Bank Reconciliation applet, the reference for every screen used here.
• Cashbook applet, for members, settlement methods and the automatching weights.