How often do you reconcile your bank statements?

bank rec ingredients

Well this depends on you, there is no rule here.

I hated doing them so much I would only do them once a quarter when I did the VAT return. But it made the whole VAT return thing into a Greek epic that lasted days and resulted in a few near murders.

So I had to re-evaluate.

Standard timings to do a Bank Reconciliation

TIMING	Advantages	Disadvantages
Anually	Save your precious time and delegate it to your accountant	Watch your hard earned disappear and do you really want to wait a whole year to discover you paid a big invoice twice?
Quarterly	Lines up nicely with a Vat to do - when you are promising the Govt you keep accurate records with penalty of fines or worse freedom. But you might work best under pressure.	If you have many transactions in and out it takes ages and some medium level detective work to find missing records all with a important deadline looming. It can amp up the pressure!
Monthly	This feels like the goldilocks place for me. The transaction level is manageable to get through it in an hour, it is easy to solve adjustments and allows you to present a monthly data report to the team	It can still be a long time between reconciliations if you have lots of transactions or if cashflow needs micromanaging.
Weekly	Little and often. It is easy to block this task into a weekly routine so it does not get pushed out or forgotten. Gives the team very quick data to action especially if cashflow is vital to monitor	For a business with a low amount of transactions this can be overkill.
Daily	​If you have volumes of transactions this is the way to go to keep on top of information or if you are waiting on client payments to release purchases!	You can get bogged down looking at leaves (micromanaging) when you actually might need to step back a bit and check the forest ( macromanage)

When do you do bank reconciliations?

It’s up to you, One will stand out and make perfect sense. If it is not working out - change it. This can be to reflect changes in your business and suit your personal preference.

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