QuickBooks® 2012 For Dummies®, UK Edition

Chapter 14

The Balancing Act

In This Chapter

Balancing your bank account

Troubleshooting when your account doesn’t balance

We want to start this chapter with an important point: balancing a bank account in QuickBooks is easy. No, we are not just trying to get you pumped up about an otherwise painfully boring topic. We don’t think that balancing a bank account is any more exciting than you do.

Our point is simply this: because bank account balancing can be tedious and boring, use QuickBooks to reduce the drudgery.

Balancing a Bank Account

As we just mentioned, balancing a bank account is quite easy in QuickBooks. In fact, we’ll go so far as to say that if you have any problems, they stem from . . . well, sloppy record-keeping that preceded your use of QuickBooks.

We get started by describing how you reconcile an account.

Giving QuickBooks information from the bank statement

In a reconciliation, as you probably know, you compare your records of a bank account with the bank’s records of the same account. You should be able to explain any difference between the two accounts – usually by pointing to cheques you wrote which haven’t yet cleared. (Sometimes deposits fall into the same category; you record a deposit, but the bank hasn’t yet credited your account.)

The first step, then, ...