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Accounting

Bank reconciliation

Also known as: Conciliación bancaria

Definition

Bank reconciliation is the process of matching a bank statement's transactions against the entries recorded in the books, identifying differences and outstanding items.

LATAM context

Reconciling is mandatory at every company's month-end close. Traditionally done by hand, matching line by line. With automatic extraction (finO$) and matching against Contpaqi/Aspel/Siigo, it drops from hours to minutes.

Concrete example

Your accounting system shows a $100,000 MXN collection on May 5, but the bank posted it on May 7. That date gap reconciles as an "in-transit deposit" and gets adjusted at close.

How it shows up on your bank statement

Reconciliation isn't a line item on the statement; it's what you do with it. The statement supplies one side of the comparison (what the bank recorded) and the books supply the other. The fields used most are the transaction date, the amount, the reference and the closing balance, which is the number the whole exercise gets validated against.

How does finO$ handle this?

finO$ exports extracted transactions in a format compatible with the bank-import feature of Contpaqi, Aspel COI, Siigo and Alegra, cutting reconciliation time by 10×.

Related terms

Outstanding items

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Frequently asked questions about Bank reconciliation

How often should you reconcile?

Monthly, at every statement close, is standard. Doing it less often doesn't save work. It just piles it up and makes it harder to remember what a three-month-old line item was for.

Why doesn't the bank balance ever match the books?

Because there are almost always items in transit: checks issued but not cashed, deposits recorded that the bank hasn't applied yet, fees the bank charged that the books don't know about. Reconciliation isn't about making the balances equal; it's about explaining the difference, item by item.

Can you reconcile without manually keying in the statement?

Yes, if you get the transactions in tabular form. Manual entry is the real bottleneck of the process, and it's also the main source of typos that later show up as differences no one can trace.