Bank reconciliation that actually finishes

The bank does not care what you meant to record. Its statement is an outside witness. When your ledger agrees with it line for line, the cash figure on your balance sheet stops being an opinion.

Why reconciliations stall

• The import breaks because every bank exports a different column layout.
• Duplicates creep in when an overlapping date range is imported twice.
• The last eight lines are unrecognisable and the session gets abandoned at 92 percent.

Matching, in order of confidence

Good matching engines work in passes. First, exact amount and date against an existing entry. Then exact amount within a few days' tolerance. Then amount plus a counterparty name recognised from your supplier and customer list. Only what survives all three passes needs a human, and that residue is usually small.

A fifteen-minute monthly routine

• Export the full month from your bank, first day to last, no gaps.
• Import it and let the engine auto-match; ignore everything it matched.
• Work the unmatched list top to bottom — categorise, or post a new entry straight from the line.
• Check the closing balance agrees to the statement. If it does, the month is proven.
• Lock the period so nothing can slide back in behind you.

What to do with the awkward ones

Transfers between your own accounts should net to zero, not appear as income. Card settlements arrive net of fees — post the gross sale and the fee separately or your margins will lie. Anything you genuinely cannot identify should be posted to a suspense account and flagged, never deleted. An unexplained line that is visible is a task; one that was deleted is a hole.