Reconciling with your bank statement

Pick the account on Accounts. Its header shows the working balance, the cleared balance (transactions the bank has finished processing), and the amount still uncleared. The Reconcile window also shows how many transactions are uncleared and when the account was last reconciled. Chequing was last reconciled to its statement, and transactions since then are marked cleared as the bank processes them. Eleven are still uncleared, including two transfers to savings that were typed in by hand and are waiting for the bank to show them.

Reconcile asks first: Mintro has $24,526.15 of cleared transactions in Prairie Credit Union Chequing. Does your bank show the same balance? If the statement agrees, answer yes and the cleared transactions are locked. If not, answer no and you are taken to the register for that account, with a checkbox beside each transaction. The difference will be a transaction you haven't ticked, one the bank has that you don't, or an amount that changed between pending and posted. As you tick what the statement shows, the cleared total moves toward the statement's balance.

Nothing is locked until the numbers match. A locked transaction can't be changed by a person or an agent without unlocking it first, which is the point: once you have checked the past, it should stay put. If a locked transaction is changed later anyway, the account shows drift: how far the locked total has moved from the statement it was checked against. Drift that isn't zero tells you exactly what to look into.

In the register, every transaction shows its bank state (pending, uncleared, cleared, or reconciled) next to its budget state (to file, or filed). Reconciling only changes the bank state. It never files anything, never moves money between envelopes, and never changes Ready to assign. It simply records that you and the bank agree about these transactions.