Reconcile Accounts in Sage 50 – Instructions

by Joseph Brownell / Tuesday, December 04 2018 / Published in Latest, Sage50, Small Business Accounting

Reconcile Accounts in Sage 50: Overview

You can reconcile accounts in Sage 50 using the “Account Reconciliation” window. Most often, users reconcile bank accounts, cash accounts, and credit card accounts. When you reconcile accounts in Sage 50, you ensure the transactions in the account within your company file match the transactions in the account’s statement from its financial institution. After receiving an account statement from a financial institution, you should reconcile the statement’s transactions to your company file’s transactions. This helps you detect bank errors, data entry errors, and fraud more quickly.

To reconcile accounts in Sage 50, select “Tasks| Account Reconciliation…” from the Menu Bar to open the “Account Reconciliation” window. Select the ID of the account to reconcile from the “Account to Reconcile” drop-down. Then enter the account’s statement date into the “Statement Date” field. If needed, you can reconcile information from prior accounting periods without leaving the current accounting period by selecting the prior period statement date within the desired prior period to reconcile from the “Statement Date” field. Next, enter the account’s balance as of the statement date into the “Statement Ending Balance” field.

At this point, all the selected account’s transactions appear in a list with deposits and bank credits shown first. To change which items appears in the transaction list, use the “Show” drop-down at the top of the window. Whatever choice you select shows those transactions for the account through the end of the selected accounting period.

You use this information to then reconcile the account transactions in Sage 50 with your bank account statement by marking the transactions that appear within the statement as “cleared” in Sage 50. As you clear the Sage 50 transactions, the “Unreconciled Difference” at the bottom of the window approaches zero. After marking all your cleared transactions, the difference should be zero.

Reconcile Accounts in Sage 50 – Instructions: A picture of a user reconciling a bank account in Sage 50.

Additional transactions not typically recorded in Sage 50 until you receive the bank statement, like bank service charges, can be added while reconciling the account. You can input bank service fees and interest earned directly into the reconciliation window. To do this, ensure you click the “Expand” button in the lower-left corner of this window to expand the “Interest Earned/Service Charges” section, if needed. Then enter any “Service Charges” or “Interest Income” into the fields of the same names in this section. Be sure to also enter the “Date” these transactions occurred, and the associated “Account” used to track their value, like a bank service fees expense account or an interest earned income account.

To clear transactions shown within the account transaction list, check the checkbox at the left of any transaction to mark it as “cleared.” After a successful reconciliation, these cleared transactions are removed from the list when you move to the next accounting period.

Also, notice there are some unique buttons in the toolbar at the top of the “Account Reconciliation” window. If you click the “OK” button, you save your changes and close the “Account Reconciliation” window. You can return at any time to finish the reconciliation, if needed.

You can click the “Multiple” button to open the “Clear Transactions” dialog box where you can select a range of transactions to clear. In this dialog box, select the types of transactions to clear from the “Type” drop-down. Then select whether to clear the transactions based on “Reference Number” or “Date Range.” Then enter a range of reference numbers or a date range within which to mark the selected type of transactions as “cleared.” Then click the “OK” button to clear the range of transactions.

To link a bank feed to your account through Sage Bank Feeds, which is a separate service, click the “Bank Feeds” button in the toolbar and then select the “Connect to Bank Feed” command to open the “Sage Bank Feeds” window. Enter and confirm your email here and then accept the terms and conditions to continue. Then follow the steps in the “Sage Bank Feeds” wizard to authenticate yourself and access your bank’s online account feed.

To import a local copy of a bank statement to match against the transactions, click the “Import” button in the toolbar to open the “Import Statement” window. To use this feature, you must have already downloaded a copy of the bank statement from your bank’s website. Then click the “Browse” button to open a dialog box that lets you select and open the saved statement file. To import the statement after selecting it, click the “Import” button to open a “Select Account” window where you can select the account from which to import.

To select reconciliation reports, if needed, click the “Reports” button in the window’s toolbar and then select the report to open. You can also click the “Clear” drop-down in the toolbar to select either “(check) All,” which checks every transaction to mark them all as cleared, or “(uncheck) All,” which unchecks every transaction to mark them all as uncleared. To enter new transactions that affect the account reconciliation, click the “Add New” button to show a drop-down menu of task window choices you can open to enter additional transactions. You can select either “General Journal Entry,” “Write Check,” “Receipt,” or “Account Register” to open the task window and then enter the additional transactions, if needed.

If you are just beginning to use Sage 50, you may need to click the “Beginning Transactions” gray arrow button in the lower-right corner of the “Interest Earned/Service Charges” section when it is expanded to open the “Beginning Transactions” window. In this window, you can enter transactions that occurred before the Sage 50 company file’s start date. These transactions will not affect the General Ledger and they are only used for account reconciliation.