How to Do a Bank Reconciliation in Sage 50

Quick Answer: In Sage 50 (US edition), choose Tasks > Account Reconciliation, pick the cash account in Account to Reconcile, enter the Statement Date and Statement Ending Balance, record interest and service charges in the lower section, and tick Clear beside each item on the statement. When the unreconciled difference reaches 0.00, click OK. Sage 50 Canada uses Banking > Reconcile Accounts instead, with Income, Expense and Transactions tabs, and finishes with Process.

A bank reconciliation in Sage 50 checks that the cash account in your general ledger agrees with the bank statement for a period. Which window you open depends on the edition: the US product and the Canadian product use different screens and wording, and Sage's cloud product is separate again. The arithmetic never changes: clear what the bank cleared, add bank-only items, reach zero.

Which Sage product are you using?

Sage sells several accounting products with similar names, and search results mix their instructions together. Identify yours before following any steps.

The US and Canadian menus below come from Sage's own help center. For the UK desktop and cloud products, start from Sage's main site and its support search, since the menu wording changes between versions.

How do you reconcile a bank account in Sage 50 US?

Sage's help topic Reconcile an Account (Bank Statement Reconciliation) gives this sequence:

1. From the Tasks menu, select Account Reconciliation.
2. In Account to Reconcile, type or look up the general ledger cash account. The question-mark key or the Lookup button lists your accounts.
3. Enter the closing date of the bank or credit card statement as the Statement Date.
4. In the lower section of the window, enter the Statement Ending Balance exactly as printed on the statement. You may need to expand that section to see every field.
5. Still in the lower section, enter any interest the bank paid, its date, and the interest income account.
6. Enter any service charges the bank deducted, their date, and the service charge expense account.
7. Work through the transaction list in the middle of the window. Select the Clear check box next to each check, payment, deposit and receipt that appears on the statement. Click a column heading to sort by check number, amount or date.
8. When everything on the statement is entered and cleared, the unreconciled difference should be 0.00. Click OK to close the window.

The window also has Add New, which lets you enter an adjusting journal entry, a check or a receipt that is on the statement but missing from the ledger, without leaving reconciliation. Use it for a forgotten automatic payment or a wire fee, not to plug an unexplained number.

One detail that confuses people on card accounts: Sage community answers note that a credit card's Statement Ending Balance is entered as a negative figure, because it is a liability. If a card reconciliation is off by exactly twice the balance, that sign is the reason.

How does Sage 50 Canada differ?

Sage 50 Canada organizes the job into tabs. According to Sage's Reconcile an Account topic, the account must first be set up for reconciliation, and the first reconciliation is a separate step. After that, each month goes like this:

• From the Home window, click Banking in the navigation pane, then Reconcile Accounts in the Tasks pane.
• Choose the account, enter the statement start and end dates, the reconciliation date, and the statement opening and end balances. A comment such as "May 31 account reconciliation" helps later.
• On the Income tab, record interest and any other income the bank reports.
• On the Expense tab, record bank charges and fees.
• On the Transactions tab, mark each item that appears on the statement in the Cleared column. Items you leave alone stay Outstanding and carry forward. You can add adjusting transactions here for statement items not yet in the books.
• The Worksheet tab summarizes the bank and account figures for a final check.
• Click Process. If an unresolved amount remains, Sage asks for an adjustment account before it will finish.

Canada also offers Void the last reconciliation, which reverses the most recent one so you can redo it. The US help topic does not describe an equivalent, so in the US edition, plan on correcting individual transactions instead.

Interest, fees and other bank-only items

Every edition gives you a place to record items you only learn about from the statement. Doing it inside the reconciliation keeps the dates and accounts consistent:

• Monthly maintenance fees and wire fees: service charge or bank charges expense.
• Interest earned: interest income.
• Returned customer checks (NSF): not a fee alone. Reverse the original receipt so the customer owes the money again, and record the bank's returned-item fee separately.
• Automatic loan or card payments: enter them as normal payments with Add New or the Transactions tab, so the liability account is reduced too.

What if the unreconciled difference is not zero?

Do not reach for the adjustment account first. Check these, roughly in order of how often they cause trouble:

1. Wrong ending balance or date. Re-read the statement. A statement date one day off can pull in or drop a transaction.
2. Opening balance changed. If last month reconciled and this month starts wrong, a previously cleared transaction was edited or deleted. Compare against last month's printed reconciliation report.
3. Missing statement items. Anything on the statement that is not in the list must be entered. Card swipes and automatic debits are the usual omissions.
4. Duplicates. A payment entered from an invoice and again from the bank feed shows up as two items, one of which never clears.
5. Transposed digits. If the difference divides evenly by 9, look for an amount like 1,830 entered as 1,380.
6. Wrong sign on card accounts. See the US note above.

Only once each of these is ruled out should a small remaining amount go to an adjustment account, and it is worth noting the reason in the memo.

Getting statement lines into Sage when there is no feed

Reconciliation goes faster when the transactions are already in Sage before you start. Sage's bank feeds work for many banks, but some accounts, older periods and foreign banks only come as PDF statements. In that case you can import a CSV of the transactions. Our guides to importing bank statements into Sage and the Sage import walkthrough cover the import formats and column mapping.

Turning a PDF into that CSV is where a converter helps. QuickBankConvert reads the statement on its servers and gives you date, description and signed amount columns in CSV or Excel; files up to 4.4 MB are accepted, and scanned or photographed statements are read less accurately than bank-generated PDFs, so check the totals against the statement before importing. The PDF to CSV page shows the output layout.

Habits that keep Sage reconciliations short

• Reconcile each month within a few days of the statement date, not at year-end.
• Print or save the reconciliation report for each period and file it with the statement PDF.
• Lock or close prior periods where your edition supports it, so cleared transactions cannot be edited by accident.
• Keep one person responsible for clearing items, so two people do not tick the same deposit in different sessions.

Related guides

• Bank statement reconciliation guide
• Import bank statements into Sage
• Sage 200 bank transaction import