Welcome to the Fit Small Business Bank Reconciliation course. In this video
we're going to show you how to reconcile a bank account using Zoho books.
To follow along with me, login to your Zoho account now or click the link below this
video for a free trial of Zoho books. Let's get started. From the Zoho books
dashboard, go ahead and click on banking on the left hand menu. And then click the
add bank or credit card button up here at the top in red. There are three ways to
connect your bank account to Zoho books. From the dropdown you can simply select
your bank, or type the name of your bank in this field. If you see your bank
listed here in this section with an icon you can simply click on that button to
select it. Or your third option is to enter the account information manually.
In the next screen you want to go ahead and enter your online ID and pass code.
Once you have done so you can go ahead and click the continue button. Once Zoho
books has connected with your bank account, you will see a list of all of
the accounts that you have at the financial institution listed in this
section here. Put a check mark next to each account that you'd like to go ahead
and connect to Zoho books. Download transaction history: from the drop-down
calendar here you want to select the date that we'd like to go back and
download transactions for. Please note that you can go back 90 days in Zoho
books. If you need to go back further than that, you will need to import the
bank statements for anything older than 90 days. For example, let's assume that
it's April 16th and your tax professional has told you if you bring
in a shoe box next year, the fee will be doubled.
So you vow to start using Zoho books immediately. In order to get all of your
banking transactions that have occurred into Zoho books since January 1st,
you can import your January bank statement, and then use February 1st as
the date you will download transaction history. In the currency field you want
to go ahead and select the appropriate currency
for the bank account you are setting up. One of the benefits of using Zoho books
is you can easily track both foreign bank and credit card accounts.
Once you've made that selection you can go ahead and click the continue button.
Once you have successfully set up the bank feed, your bank accounts will be
listed in the banking overview section as you can see here. In the account
details column, you will see the name of your bank account, type of bank account,
the last four digits of the bank account number which is not shown here for
security reasons, and you will also see a date here. This date represents the date
that the latest transactions were downloaded from your bank. In the
uncategorized column, you will find the number of transactions that you need to
review and categorize to the appropriate income or expense account. Please note if
you have already entered some of your banking transactions in Zoho books then
you will also have a column that says recognized. This means that Zoho has
matched a transaction that you entered manually with one downloaded from your
bank. The pending checks column reflects checks that you have created in Zoho
books but you have not printed. The balance amount in bank column represents
the balance in the bank account as of the last update. And the final column
here amount in Zoho books: this is the current balance in the bank account per
Zoho books. These are also basically another way to say this is transactions
that have been categorized to income and expense accounts. Please note that the
goal of the reconciliation process is for the amount in the bank account, this
column, to equal the amount in Zoho books, this column. Let's go ahead and walk
through the steps required to assign an account to the uncategorized
transactions. So you want to go ahead and click on the uncategorized
column for the bank account that you'd like to work with. For this account we've
just got one uncategorized transaction but typically you'll probably have pages
of transactions so you want to scroll down to the very bottom, and scroll over
to the oldest transactions and work from there. So go ahead and click on the
transaction. And so what happens is a window opens up here over to the right
which will allow us to complete the fields of information that we need to
categorize this transaction. So the first field here is category from the
drop-down you want to select the type of transaction that this represents.
The options that you have to choose from are listed here: expense, vendor advance,
vendor payment, transfer to another account, sales return, card payment, owner
drawings, credit note refund, and payment refund. Expense account: from the
drop-down select the appropriate account. If the account is not set up you can set
it up by clicking this + new account button here at the very bottom.
The vendor field is optional. From the drop-down you can select the appropriate
vendor. If the vendor is not set up you can click the + new vendor button and
set the vendor up in this screen. As you can see here the amount field has
already been populated and there's no ability to edit that information so
that's the amount that downloaded directly from the bank. The reference
field is optional. In this field you can enter any additional information about
this transaction such as a purchase order number. The description field will
automatically populate with the description from the bank.
You can change the description or delete it altogether. Attach receipt: Zoho
books allows you to attach receipts directly to the transactions they are
associated with. So you have the option of
attaching a receipt from your desktop, from the cloud, or attach it from other
documents. Customer: if the transaction is related to a customer, you can select the
customer from the drop-down. If the customer has not been set up you can
click the + new customer option here and set the customer up directly in this
screen. Once you have categorized the transactions that have been downloaded,
you can go ahead and save your work here. And once you have categorized all the
transactions that were downloaded, you'll no longer see transactions in
the uncategorized column, that message has gone away. And you will also notice that the
amount in bank matches the amount in Zoho books column. As mentioned
previously you can reconcile as often as you like. Since any new transactions will
download daily. When you receive your bank statement at the end of the month,
it will be a breeze to reconcile if you have already categorized your banking
transactions throughout the month. Let's walk through the steps you should take
to complete the monthly bank reconciliation. From the banking overview
screen you want to go ahead and click on the account that you would like to
reconcile. From this screen in the upper right hand corner you want to click on
this gear icon and select reconciliation history. And as you can see from this
screen we have not reconciled this account yet. If we had previously
reconciled this account, we would have information here listing the
reconciliation information as you can see, so we'll go ahead and click
reconcile account. In this screen you want to go ahead and enter information
directly from your bank statement. So here we're going to enter the beginning
and ending statement periods in each of these fields. Please note if you are
reconciling more than one month, then be sure to use the beginning date of the
first month and the ending date of the last
month. So in this example we are reconciling three months worth of
transactions so we've gotten a little bit behind. So we're going to reconcile
the month of April, the month of May, and the month of June. Because we're
reconciling those three months the beginning statement date will represent
April first, the first day of the first month we're reconciling. And then the
ending date will represent the last day of the last month we're reconciling. In
this example it would be June. So you want to enter that information in this
field. And then you want to enter the ending balance from the bank statement
that's listed in this field here, okay? So that goes in the closing balance field.
Once you have completed all of those fields then you can go ahead and click the
start reconciliation button. In the next screen you will see a list of all
transactions that were downloaded and categorized in Zoho books. So the date
column here in this screen represents the date of the transaction.
Transaction details: this is the account that you categorized the transactions to. The type
column represents the type of account that you selected for transaction
details. Along with the name of the vendor if you chose a vendor for the
transaction. The deposits column represents all of the deposits that were
made to the account, and the withdrawals column represents all of the withdrawals
that were made to the account. The clear column represents items that were
downloaded from the bank which means that they have essentially cleared the
bank. If you do not have a check mark in this column next to a transaction, then
more than likely it was probably manually entered and you need to make
sure to put a check mark there so that you can balance. If we scroll down to the
very bottom, we've got a closing balance here as of June 30th of $2,038.35 here.
So this is the ending balance that you
entered earlier from your bank statement. The cleared amount here
$2,038.35 is the total amount of all transactions that were
downloaded to Zoho books from your bank, or manually entered. So it's basically
the total of everything up above that has a check mark. The difference columns
represents the difference between the closing balance and the cleared amount.
Our goal is to get to a difference of zero as we have here. Please note if you
do not have a zero balance here I want you to refer to our tips for reconciling
bank accounts later on in this section. We have a link here that says add
transaction. If you discover that you have transactions that are missing,
then you can go ahead and click add transaction and this will take you to
the Zoho books where you can actually add those missing transactions. And then
you can return here to complete your reconciliation. And again as we discussed
previously you can attach a copy of your bank statement, clear cheques, receipts, or
other supporting documents here for future reference. At the very bottom of
the screen you will see three buttons: save and reconcile later, reconcile, and
cancel. The save and reconcile later button is going to become your friend.
If for some reason you are working through a reconciliation and you're out of
balance and can't figure it out, or you get interrupted and you've got to
move on to something else, you can save and reconcile later which means that it
will save your work so that you can come back and pick up where you left off.
Reconcile: you only want to click this button if your difference here is zero.
If your balance is not zero be sure to refer to the tips that I've shared with
you on reconciling bank accounts. Please note that Zoho books
will not allow you to proceed with a reconciliation until your balance is
zero. And for the cancel button, click this button if you don't want to save
your work and your plan is to start over from scratch. Since we are in balance
we're going to go ahead and reconcile this account. Once you do that you will
see that we are back at the reconciliation history screen now. And so
this is a reconciliation that we just completed and the status is reconciled.
So please note that if you decided to save and reconcile later, the status will
show in progress until you complete the reconciliation. Please also note that if
you accidentally click the reconcile button and you didn't mean to, you can
undo a reconciliation by hovering in the row here and then you will see a picture
of a trashcan. If you hover over that it says undo reconciliation. Now let's talk
about some tips for reconciling bank accounts. If you're having trouble
getting to a zero difference between what's in Zoho books versus what your bank
statement has, try some of these troubleshooting tips. Tip number one: make
sure that each transaction that's listed has a check mark in the far right column
marked clear. So we talked about that previously. If a transaction does not
have a check mark, it is not included in the cleared amount total. Tip number two:
the difference could be one transaction. So look for the exact dollar amount that
you are off. For example if your difference is $42, then look at
your bank statement to see if there is one transaction for this amount. If not,
check the transactions recorded in Zoho books. Tip number three: make sure that
every transaction on your bank statement has been recorded in Zoho books.
Any transactions that are listed on your bank statement
but do not appear in Soho books will cause you to be out of balance and vice
versa. You will need to add the transaction to Zoho books, and then
proceed with the reconciliation. Tip number four: unless you don't have a lot
of transactions, I would not recommend reconciling more than one month at a
time. The more transactions you have to reconcile, the higher the chances are
that you will have a difference. Locating an out of balance will be that much
harder to find if you have to look through two or three months worth of
transactions as opposed to just one month. And finally tip number five: if you
have a difference greater than a dollar, and you have not been successful with
figuring things out, I suggest that you start the reconciliation over. You can do
this at any time by clicking that cancel button as we discussed previously. By now
you should have a better understanding of how reconciling your bank accounts
can help you to stay on top of the cash coming in and going out of your business,
and make tax time a breeze. Remember to keep the following tips in
mind to make this process as smooth as possible.
First, be sure to organize and store receipts in the cloud using a receipt
scanner app. Click the link below to access our guide on best receipt scanner
apps. Second, invest in an accounting software like Zoho books so that
you can connect your bank accounts and automatically download and categorize
transactions as often as you like. Third, compare receipts to the bank statements
to ensure only transactions that you have authorised are being deducted from
your bank account. That wraps up our video tutorial on how to reconcile a
bank account using Zoho books.
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