Bank reconciliation

Import a bank statement, auto-match it against your books, resolve the differences and close the reconciliation with confidence.

What bank reconciliation is

Bank reconciliation is the routine of proving that your books agree with your bank. You take a statement from the bank, line it up against what you recorded in Qontab, and confirm that the two tell the same story — same movements, same closing balance. When they match, you know your numbers are real; when they don’t, the difference is a transaction you missed, duplicated or mistyped.

It’s the single most reliable control in small-business accounting, because the bank is an independent source of truth. Qontab makes it quick by doing the tedious part — the matching — for you.

How Qontab reconciles

Each bank account in Qontab holds its own ledger of postings. A reconciliation compares a period’s statement lines (what the bank says) to your book entries (what you posted) and tracks which ones are matched. Qontab pairs them by amount and date, surfaces anything left over, and only lets you finish when the statement balance and the book balance agree.

• Auto-match pairs the obvious lines for you — same amount, near date.
• Manual match handles the rest: split payments, fees, transfers that cleared on a different day.
• Unmatch reverses a wrong pairing without touching the underlying entry.
• Complete closes the reconciliation once the balances tie out.

Step by step

1. Open the bank account and import the statement (CSV). Qontab reads each line — date, amount, description.
2. Run auto-match. Confidently-paired lines are marked matched; the rest stay open.
3. For each open line, either match it to an existing entry or record the missing transaction (a bank fee, an interest credit, a payment you hadn’t entered).
4. When every line is explained and the statement balance equals the book balance, complete the reconciliation.

Handling mismatches

A leftover line almost always means one of three things, and each has a clean fix:

• Missing entry — the bank shows it, your books don’t. Record it (an income or expense) and match.
• Duplicate — you recorded it twice. Delete the extra entry.
• Timing — a transfer that left one account today and arrives tomorrow. Match it once both sides have cleared.

If the closing balances still differ after every line is matched, the gap is an opening balance or a prior-period entry — start from the last reconciled date and work forward.

Reconcile with AI (MCP)

Connected to an AI assistant through the Qontab MCP connector, reconciliation becomes a sentence. The composite tool import_bank_and_reconcile auto-matches a statement and completes the reconciliation if everything ties out — otherwise it hands back the unmatched lines for you (or the assistant) to resolve with match_bank_transaction.

FAQ