Reconciling

Reconciling Budgetizer with your bank statement

The Account Transactions Screen displays the transactions in an Account. To reconcile Budgetizer with your bank's (or other financial institution's) statement, follow these steps:

Check your initial balance
First, you should make sure that the balance listed in the "Statement Balance" in Budgetizer matches the initial balance on your financial statement. If it does not, you will need to correct this situation first. This may be corrected by adding a transaction to Budgetizer to cover the difference. This usually only happens when you first use Budgetizer. If you reconcile Budgetizer with each subsequent statement, this should not happen again. If your previous reconciliation was correct, this may indicate an error on your bank's part.

Create a Backup
This step is not actually required, however, it may be handy to have a backup of your records from before you reconcile, so that if your final balances do not match, and you cannot figure out why, you can restore from backup and try again. Click here to learn more about backing up your data.

Adjust your filters
Above each column on the screen is a filter option. Click here to learn more about how to use filtering. You will need to change the filters in the following ways:

Passed: This may be either checked or unchecked. It will be easier to reconcile if you uncheck this filter (so that only unpassed records are shown).
ID: This filter should be blank.
Date: This filter should be set far enough back to cover the oldest transaction on your financial statement.
Amount: This filter should be blank.
To/From: This filter should be blank.
Notes: This filter should be blank.

Pass transactions
In the "Passed" column, there is a checkbox for each transaction displayed. In order to reconcile with your financial statement, you should click the check box of each transaction that appears on your statement as having cleared. You may wish to use the filters or the search window to find transactions that appear on your statement. As you do this, two things will happen. If you have unchecked the "passed" filter, the transaction will disappear. Also, the "Statement Balance" field in Budgetizer will change.

Check your final balance
After you have passed all of the transactions which appear on your financial statement, the value in "Statement Balance" should match the final balance on your financial statement. If these numbers do not match, there is an error somewhere. Check to make sure you passed all of the transactions (and only those transactions) which appear on the statement, and that the values of all of these transactions matches the values shown on the statement. You can delete or edit these transactions as needed. If you cannot determine the error, you may want to restore from backup if you made one in the second step.

Create a Backup
Again, this step is not actually required. However, once you have successfully reconciled your records with your financial statement, it is a good idea to have a backup at this point. Click here to learn more about backing up your data.