Bank Reconciliation Checklist

The single check most people leave out is the one that catches the worst errors: does opening balance + transactions = closing balance? If it doesn't, something is missing or misread, and no amount of category tidying will fix it.

The bank reconciliation checklist (in order)

Run these in sequence. Each step assumes the one before it passed.

1. Match the opening balance. The opening balance on this statement must equal the closing balance from the previous period. If they don't match, stop — you have a gap before you've even started, and reconciling the new period won't close it.
2. Confirm the statement period. Note the exact start and end dates. A common slip is reconciling a statement that overlaps the previous one by a day, which double-counts whatever fell on the boundary.
3. Tick off every transaction. Go line by line, matching each statement entry to your ledger or accounting software. Mark deposits and withdrawals separately. Don't batch — a 40 and a 400 that net out can look "done" while both are wrong.
4. Check the running balance after every line. This is the step that earns its place. Take the opening balance, apply each transaction in date order, and confirm your running total matches the bank's running balance column at every row. The first row where they diverge is where the error sits.
5. Verify the closing balance. Opening balance plus all credits minus all debits must equal the printed closing balance. If it does, the statement reconciles. If it's off by even a small amount, treat the whole statement as unverified.
6. Account for timing items. Outstanding cheques, deposits in transit, and payments that cleared the bank but aren't yet in your books are legitimate reconciling items — list them, don't ignore them. They explain a difference between the bank balance and your book balance.
7. Investigate bank-only entries. Fees, interest, standing orders, and direct debits often appear on the statement before they're in your ledger. Post them, then re-check the running balance.
8. Resolve every difference to zero. A reconciliation that "nearly balances" hasn't balanced. Find the cause — a transposed figure (54 keyed as 45), a duplicate, a missed line, a wrong date — and correct it. The goal is a clean zero, not a small one.
9. Lock it and keep the evidence. Once it reconciles, mark the period closed and keep the statement, the worked figures, and a note of any timing items. You'll want that trail at year end or for an audit.

Why the running-balance check matters most

Most reconciliation guidance stops at "match your transactions to the bank". That's necessary, but it's not sufficient. You can match every line you *have* and still be missing a line you never saw — a payment dropped during data entry, a row lost when a multi-page PDF was copied, or a figure misread during scanning.

The running balance is the safety net. The bank prints a balance after each transaction. If you recompute that balance yourself from the opening figure forwards, the row where your number stops agreeing with the bank's is the exact location of the problem. We've seen statements where everything looked tidy until row 38, where a 1,200 transfer had been dropped — the running balance flagged it instantly, the eyeball check never would have.

This is also the part people get wrong when they move data out of a PDF. Copy-paste and most basic converters give you rows of numbers with no idea whether those rows are *complete*. They'll happily hand you a spreadsheet that's missing three transactions and looks perfectly normal.

Reconciling a converted PDF statement

If your statement arrived as a PDF — or a scan, or a phone photo — the checklist still applies, but there's an extra failure point: extraction. A character misread (a 3 read as an 8), a wrapped line split into two, or a column shifted by one can break the maths without breaking the appearance.

Here's the honest workflow. Export Bank Statement converts the PDF — including scanned and photographed statements via OCR — into clean Excel or CSV. The differentiator is what happens next: it runs the running-balance check for you, recomputing opening + transactions against the printed closing balance and flagging any statement that doesn't reconcile. You see the problem before you trust the numbers, not after you've posted them.

From there the path into your accounting software is convert, then import the CSV. The tool exports in the native bank-import format for Xero, QuickBooks, and Zoho Books, so the lines come in as reconcilable statement lines. It does not push transactions through a live bank-feed API — that's a different, certified integration — so think of it as producing a verified import file, not a one-click sync.

Manual reconciliation vs a verified conversion

The time figures are illustrative, not a benchmark — your mileage depends on statement length and quality. The point of the table is the second column: a manual reconciliation relies on you spotting what's absent, which is the hardest thing for a human to do.