A bank reconciliation is essentially a ticking off process that helps you check that cash passing in and out of your bank account matches with what has been accounted for in Brightpearl. It's important to make sure that the banking transactions in Brightpearl match those in your bank account, and a regular check will keep everything in order.
If you've never done a bank reconciliation before or want to learn more about what's happening why don't you have a read of our page on Understanding a Bank Reconciliation
Setting Up
You won't want to reconcile all of your accounts, only the ones where you have access to a regular paper or electronic statement. To mark an account so that Brightpearl prompts you to reconcile, go to Accounting > Chart of Accounts and edit the relevant account. You can set any of your nominal accounts to be a "bank account" due for reconciliation.
Reconciling with an Electronic Statement
The Brightpearl bank statement import lets you upload bank statements which are electronically provided by your bank. Not only does this make the ticking off process quick and easy but Brightpearl also lets you create receipts and payments right from within the matching process, so payments that have cleared your account can be reconciled at the same time as being receipted saving you valuable time!
Learn more about the bank matching process with imported statements
Reconciling with a Paper Statement
If you are working with a paper statement, perhaps from your bank, then it's generally easier just to use the traditional reconciliation process. This involves entering your statement start and end dates, along with the start and end balances, so that when everything matches up OK the difference between Brightpearl and your paper statement is zero.
Create the Statement
- Go to Accounting > Reconcile, then from the bank menu choose the relevant account to reconcile.
- Click the Add a new statement button.
- Enter the statement reference, start and end dates. Note that a statement can't start on the same day that the previous statement finishes, so you may need to enter the start date 1 day later than it says on the paperwork.
- Enter the end balance. The start balance is automatically taken from your last reconciliation. If this is your first reconciliation enter the start balance from the statement too.
- Click Save.
You will be taken to a screen that lists all the transactions in Brightpearl that fall between the statement start and end dates, along with all prior unreconciled transactions (items that may have been from a previous period but hadn't yet hit your bank account as explained above).
Match Transactions
Work through your paper statement, ticking off each transaction on the paper as well as in Brightpearl. You can save the progress at any time, and come back later if you need to. Once everything matches on both Brightpearl and the paper statement, you should have a zero difference and a Close Statement button will appear, allowing you to mark this statement as closed; you can also transfer the balance to another bank account at the same time.
Each time that you save the statement with ticked transactions, each transaction is instantly marked as reconciled, and won't be editable in the correction screen. If you need to correct a transaction you can unreconcile the statement.
Unreconcile
While the reconciliation is only "saved" you can easily unreconcile an item by unticking it in the reconciliation process. Once the statement has been marked "closed" you can unreconcile or reverse the whole reconciliation of a given statement by going to Accounting > Reconcile and select the bank account to view the list of statements reconciled. Then click Clear all to the right of the relevant statement to revert the reconciliation for all transactions on the given statement.
Making Corrections
Reconciliation is the point at which you're going to find that things don't match. Perhaps it's the transaction value, or the date, or maybe it's missing completely. Because Brightpearl is a web-based system, if you're using a modern internet browser you can open multiple tabs, and make corrections in one tab whilst doing the reconciliation in another. You'll see that there's a pencil "edit" icon next to each transaction in the reconcile screen. If you click this, it will take you to the journal correction screen in another tab. Make any changes you need to, then close the tab and click Save on the reconciliation screen to reload the transactions with the corrected entry now in place.
To open a new tab hold down the CTRL key and click where you would like to go in Brightpearl.
Learn more about making corrections
Reporting
You can quickly see which bank accounts have unreconciled transactions on the bank accounts screen, they are highlighted with a red link, go to Accounting > List Bank Accounts . There's also a bank reconciliation report, which can be reached from a link on the bank accounts screen when a bank account has unreconciled transactions.
The bank account activity report will also show which of the transactions are reconciled with a green tick on the right hand side, you can filter the report to show just unreconciled transactions if you need to.
