Balancing Accounts#

Balancing an account is when you reconcile what is in your records versus a statement that you received from your bank or credit card company.

When you right click on an account, you can Select the "Balance Account" menu item:

This will cause a new panel to appear for balancing your account.

Enter the new bank statement date, and the "Ending Balance", in this case it shows "$32,442.72" for the ending balance.

The Statement File field is optional, but it allows you to store a .pdf containing your actual bank statement in a special *.Statements directory next to your Money database file. If you provide a file then the reconciled transactions will have an enabled Goto statement context menu item that will open this statement file so you can check it later.

The Interest Earned field is optional, if it finds an interest transaction it will show you this amount automatically.  If you enter a non-zero number here it will simply create an interest transaction for you.

At the bottom it shows your current balance compared with the ending balance you are expecting.  If there is any difference it will show that in the "Off by " field.

When this reaches zero you are done balancing your account and you will see this confirmation:

You can also cancel at any time and go back to what you were doing and it will undo any reconciliation you did.

When balancing an account a compact view of all your transactions in the specified statement range appear so you can mark the matching transactions listed on your bank statement as "Reconciled " with an "R" in the Status column.  During this time newly reconciled transactions are highlighted in green so you can more easily see your progress.

For added convenience you can press CTRL+SPACE to advance through the list of transactions marking them as reconciled.

The set of transactions associated with a given statement date is remembered.  When you pick a previous reconciliation date from this drop down combo the transactions reconciled in that statement will appear highlighted in green.  This way you can always go back in time and correct any mistakes, when you click Done it will update that past statement.  But be careful you set the correct "New Statement" balance when you do that because if you have the wrong number it will throw off any forward statements and they will no longer balance.

After you are finished with balancing your account the "Reconciled" transactions will not let you accidentally change their "Amount", nor will it let you delete them.  This helps ensure that your accounting doesn't get messed up.  If you really need to modify a reconciled transaction then you need to go back into "balance" mode and then it will let you edit these transactions, and you can also be sure to leave the account balanced when you are done.  The only way then to mess things up is to go into balance mode, modify the amount of a reconciled transaction,  then hit "Cancel" - needless to say, this is not recommended.