Bank Statement Reconciliation

This feature allows users to match up A/R Cash Receipt and A/P Payment transactions in Naviga with the transactions listed on a Bank Statement to verify that all activity has been recorded properly.

Prerequisites

The first system setting that affects the Bank Reconciliation is in the menu Setup -> Admin -> Group Security -> A/P Security setting for whether users are allowed to re-open Closed Statements.

This affects user’s ability to un-check the “Reconciliation Complete” box within a Statement.

The next system setting is to allow a Bank Statement to be for multiple banks and also show a break-out of the Bank G/L codes. For example, a user can have a bank for credit card payments and a different one for checks. This will facilitate the reconciliation process to display statements from both banks on one screen.

Navigate to the menu Setup -> System Tables Setup -> Bank Setup. Choose the bank from the drop-down menu and scroll to the section titled: “Other Settings” and choose the field Associated Bank(s) for Reconciliation and choose one or more banks to associate this bank with them. When reconciling the Bank Statement for this bank you can include transactions for other bank codes. This is necessary if you set up multiple Naviga bank codes for the same bank account. Click on “Save”.

Usage

The Bank Reconciliation function is accessed from the menu in the A/P Module -> Bank Reconciliation -> Bank Statement Reconciliation. Select a Bank to reconcile. Then create a new Statement by clicking on the “New” button, which will result in a pop-up window.

On the pop-up window, enter the corresponding information for the Bank Statement being reconciled. Any Bank Fees or Interest / Credits entered here will generate a G/L Cash Entry going to the specified account (and offset by a Debit/Credit to the selected Bank’s Cash account). This transaction will use the Financial Period specified at the bottom of the pop-up window.

Alternatively, users can enter Bank Fees and/or Interest separately as G/L Cash Receipts and/or GL Cash Disbursements respectively. Such entries can then be reconciled using the same procedure (below) as other Payments and Deposits. Note that G/L Cash transactions created from this Statement pop-up can never be marked as Unreconciled and they are tied to this Statement Date.

After creating a Statement, the system will load all A/R Cash Receipts for this Bank into the “Unreconciled Deposits” shutter on the left, up to and including the Statement Date, if they have not previously been marked as Reconciled (see Reconciliation Outside the Statement). The same will be done for A/P Payments in the “Unreconciled Payments” tab.

Users can then check the boxes for individual transactions as they match up with the Statement or check the box in the Column Titles bar to select all transactions at once. After selecting the transactions to mark as reconciled, click on the “Move Selected Items to Reconciled” button. The system will move all lines with a checkmark into the “Reconciled Transactions” shutter on the right.

At the same time, the “Reconciled Receipts” field at the top of the screen will populate with the sum of the items that have been moved over. The new “Reconciled Total” will be compared to the “Ending Balance” that was entered, and the difference calculated and displayed.

After doing the same thing for ‘Unreconciled Payments,” if everything balances – meaning the Difference field reports as zero, then user can check the “Reconciliation Complete” box. If not, user can check the boxes for individual transactions on the right-hand side and move them back to “Unreconciled” status or select and move all transactions to start over.

When there are a lot of Unreconciled Deposits listed, there are other methods of grouping the data that might make it easier to reconcile. First, user can summarize by Entry Date - this might match up with daily Deposit Slips, for example.

Note that the Entry Date column becomes the primary field in the list. Individual transactions can still be expanded and viewed by clicking on the “>” symbol on the left to expand that item.

The other option is to Summarize by Batch. This makes the Batch ID column into the primary field and individual items within that Batch can be viewed by expanding the Batch.

The “Unreconciled Payments” tab does not have any alternative grouping methods. However, like many other Naviga functions, user can click on the Column Title to sort by that column, click again to reverse sort, and click a third time to clear the sort.

Note that after creating a new statement, you can modify any of the numbers by clicking in any of the fields in case you made an error on the initial entry.

Imported Statements

If the Bank Statement is available digitally in a table format, or can be converted to such a format, then Excel can be used to create a CSV file that can be imported into Naviga. This import can be used to automatically reconcile the Statement data against the “Unreconciled” transactions.

This function is available on the Imported Statements shutter within an already created Statement.

The import file must have the following columns as described in the on-screen Import note (“?”). For best results, the Transaction IDs in Column 4 should match what was used in Naviga.

After importing, clicking on the “Auto Reconcile” button will display the Naviga transaction ID(s) in the “Auto Reconciled IDs” column according to the following rules, as described in the on-screen Auto Reconcile note (“?”).

The automation doesn’t cover every step in the process. User must still manually mark the checkboxes for the indicated transactions and then click on the ”Move Selected Items to Reconciled” button.

Linked Documents

You also have the ability to link their bank statement against the statement date that they are creating. In the bank reconciliation page, enter a description and a URL for the document to link to this statement.

Click the + and repeat as needed.