Bank Reconciliation Template
A bank reconciliation proves that the cash figure in your books and the balance on the bank statement describe the same money. The two almost never match on the day, and the template exists to explain the gap item by item until the difference is zero.
Most of the gap is timing, not error. Payments you have issued that have not cleared, deposits banked after the statement cut-off, a card payment taken three days later than the sale. These belong in the outstanding-items block: they are already in your books and will appear on the bank in due course. Nothing needs correcting, they just need listing.
The other half runs the opposite way — items the bank knows about and your books do not. Account fees, interest, FX charges, a direct debit you forgot, a payment that bounced back. These are real entries that have to be posted, and a reconciliation that is quietly plugged instead of posting them will be wrong again next month, by the same amount plus a new one.
The sheet ends with the proof: book balance adjusted for bank-only items, bank balance adjusted for outstanding items, and the two sides equal. Anything left over after that is an error worth finding — a duplicate entry, a transposed amount, or a payment nobody recorded. A difference that cannot be explained is the whole reason the exercise exists.
Done monthly on a busy account this takes hours and finds problems weeks after they happened. Finmap matches bank transactions to records as they arrive, which turns reconciliation from a month-end exercise into a short daily glance at what did not match.
