Bank - Reconciliation

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. This check is called reconciliation.

Setting an account up for reconciliation

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, visit the Accounts - Setup - 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

If you import electronic statements, then you can reconcile using the transaction matching process, and you can skip the traditional "opening and closing balance" method if you want to.

To import and match against your statment, read the instructions here:

http://www.thisispearl.com/importing-statements-c-419.html

Each time you match a transaction in Brightpearl against an entry in your statement, it will be marked as reconciled.

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

Click Accounts : Banking, then from the banking menu choose the relevant account to reconcile.
Click the link at the top of the screen to create a new statement.
Enter the details from the statement. 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.
Save, and you will be taken to a screen that lists all the transactions in Brightpearl that fal between the statement start and end dates, along with all prior unreconciled transactions.

Match the 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.

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.

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 unreconcile or reverse reconciliation of a given statement, Click the 'reconcile' link for a given bank account to view the list of statements reconciled. Then click 'Clear all' to the right of the statement listing to revert the reconciliation for all transactions on the given statement.

Reporting

You can quickly see which bank accounts have unreconciled transactions on the bank accounts screen - they are highlighted with a red link. 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 Bank Activity Report to show just unreconciled transactions if you need to.

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