Killer bank rec - help!

Monsoon

Hey guys
I'm tearing my hair out and hoping the answer is staring me in the face.
I have a client who keeps their books in Do$h Cashbook, and they do use the bank reconciliation function. However, being a basic cashbook I can't view past reconciliations, and they've gone on and done future months as well, so it's not like the last reconciliation was 31st March either.
It just doesn't reconcile.
The b/f balance was correct, but after taking into account the receipts and payments that are in the books as March but that haven't cleared, it's still out by £1000. The books show £1000 Cr vs the bank statement.
The bank is very very busy so I can't just do a quick check of things.

Any bright ideas? I want to scream....

T.C.

Best advice. Leave it for half an hour and have a coffee. Re-start it later and you may find the problem jumps right out at you. :001_smile:

Nilesh Mandvia

On Excel

Without having the data it would be difficult to pinpoint the error.

However I dealt with one messy bank recon (Sage 50 FC V 6) a while ago. The client set up bank as nominal instead of as a bank account and used other bank account as get way to pay the supplier from this bank (nominal account). I used spreadsheet with two different dates column transaction date and bank rec/statement date column. I then used sumif formula to reconcile first by day then by month.

I suggest, see if you could down data from accounting package as csv. It might have a tick or flag as reconciled transactions. Use this data and compare with the bank transaction. I know it is not easy option you are looking for but I do not know how you can do any other way.

Nilesh

Monsoon

Thanks guys.
The whole bookkeeping is a liability, due to the limitations of the software as well as the fact that they don't have a bookkeeper. My colleague quite rightly advised that if it doesn't work, it's a lengthy (and thus costly) process to fix it, as Nilesh you also say. The alternative is to Cr Sales £1000 to reconcile the bank, and the £280 tax/ Class4 NI is less to pay than the accountancy bill for fixing it...
I will resign from this appointment after 0708, this is the latest in a string of things and I'd love it to be someone else's problem next year. Either that or they pay a bookkeeper to give me a perfect TB.
This is the first time I've ever hated a job so much I plan to resign, it's a bit sad really, but the stress (I feel physically sick at the moment) just isn't worth it.

Thanks again, good to talk it out :thumbup1:

PS Nilesh I wish I could export to csv! Alas I cant. Csv exports have saved the day for me a number of times in the past!

PGM

I was in a similar position a while back. Instead of doing the reconciliation as normal, I worked through the bank statements backwards and worked out what wasn't cashed. Then reconciled everything apart from them, seemed to work out alright!