Taking on bank balances

When you produce a trial balance for a set of accounts, the bank balance on the report represents a reconciled bank balance. A reconciled bank balance includes transactions that have been posted in your accounts but have not gone through your bank account.

You will need to take these transactions into account. For example, if you wrote out a cheque on 20 February, and are doing your take on for 28 February but the cheque has not yet gone through the bank account, you are going to need to make allowance for it. The reason is that when the cheque does go through the bank, the bank balance will change and you cannot capture the cheque again because it has already been accounted for.

Thus bring in your bank balance as per your bank statement and bring in all the unreconciled cheques.

For example, your bank balance on your bank statement is R20 000, and two outstanding cheques with a value of R3 000, your reconciled bank balance (trial balance value), would be R17 000. When you capture the batch, you would process the transaction as shown below.

Go to Ledger > Adjustment Journal and click on New Batch.

Click on Post to capture the journal entries