Reconciliation Problem - Fully Track a Transaction?

[rmerriam]

I took over as Treasurer a few months ago. We have a Church Admin who does the hands-on work with PC. We've got a reconciliation problem we're trying to resolve before our FY ends June 30. There are a half-dozen entries that appear as outstanding items from previous months.

They are either AR or CONTRIB transactions. I've walked back through a couple of the AR entries but cannot see why there is a problem. There are no duplicate entries, for instance.

Is there a way to generate a report to show each step in the sequence to detect where the misstep occurs. For instance, can I start with the AR invoice and get a report that track all the resulting steps? That is basically what I've done manually. I also stepped through from invoice to posting of another AR entry to compare the steps but could not see any difference.

Any suggestions?

[NeilZ]

I took over as Treasurer a few months ago. We have a Church Admin who does the hands-on work with PC. We've got a reconciliation problem we're trying to resolve before our FY ends June 30. There are a half-dozen entries that appear as outstanding items from previous months.

They are either AR or CONTRIB transactions. I've walked back through a couple of the AR entries but cannot see why there is a problem. There are no duplicate entries, for instance.

Is there a way to generate a report to show each step in the sequence to detect where the misstep occurs. For instance, can I start with the AR invoice and get a report that track all the resulting steps? That is basically what I've done manually. I also stepped through from invoice to posting of another AR entry to compare the steps but could not see any difference.

Any suggestions?

OK ... the Contributions and AR transactions in Funds Accounting are usually Bank Deposits. I'm assuming that all the bank statements have been verified, that these deposits have either cleared, or did not appear.

I'm going to assume you're using v11.x. Contributions does have a audit trail, but AR does not.

However, if you're seeing these transactions in Funds Accounting, then they have been posted from AR and Contributions properly. So I'm going to assume that the problem is that you're not seeing them clear the bank.

You're going to need to locate any deposit slip copies and bank deposit receipts for those transactions. However, if the bank has no knowledge of them, then there are other issues that need to be addressed, and they probably have nothing to do with the program or the way the program handles the transactions.

[rmerriam]

Yes, that makes sense. I will look for the missing deposits.

Thanks.

[rmerriam]

The Admin and I tackled this on Friday without success. It is very strange.

For instance, one AR transaction is a credit card payment. It appears in the listing for the credit card service and the amount on the bank statement is correct. So we are 99% sure the payment made it into the bank. Same with the other AR postings whether check or credit card. We walked through a couple of the Account Activities reports where these items are posted. No duplicates or other weirdness.

I can see the invoice in AR and the posting from AR to the line items. The reconciliations go to zero but these 6 items hang out there as unmatched.

A member who is a bookkeeper and somewhat familiar with PC is coming in Tuesday morning to look. But I'd sure appreciate any other suggestions on how to find this. It's getting really tempting to just post some "we don't know why this is wrong but we're just going to say the heck with it" entries.

Out of desperation we did a backup and reindex on the Accounting files. I saw that recommendation in another forum posting about reconciliation problems. No change. The CA was a bit afraid of the backup and reindex. I'm an old software hand so "Meh!".

[NeilZ]

The Admin and I tackled this on Friday without success. It is very strange.

For instance, one AR transaction is a credit card payment. It appears in the listing for the credit card service and the amount on the bank statement is correct. So we are 99% sure the payment made it into the bank. Same with the other AR postings whether check or credit card. We walked through a couple of the Account Activities reports where these items are posted. No duplicates or other weirdness.

I can see the invoice in AR and the posting from AR to the line items. The reconciliations go to zero but these 6 items hang out there as unmatched.

So you can find this AR Deposit on the Bank Statement?? Did you check the reconciliation report that goes with that bank statement? Was it matched at that time, if so, how did the system come to a Zero reconciliation?

A member who is a bookkeeper and somewhat familiar with PC is coming in Tuesday morning to look. But I'd sure appreciate any other suggestions on how to find this. It's getting really tempting to just post some "we don't know why this is wrong but we're just going to say the heck with it" entries.

Always a good idea, usually a second pair of eyes (or in this case a third) can see something that you can't.

Out of desperation we did a backup and reindex on the Accounting files. I saw that recommendation in another forum posting about reconciliation problems. No change. The CA was a bit afraid of the backup and reindex. I'm an old software hand so "Meh!".

Doing a backup is ALWAYS a good idea when you're having issues, this way you have a copy of what the data was before you started making changes, so you can revert back to the original. And as far as the reindex, always a good idea to do a reindex every month or so. A reindex can often fix a few issues, but it also tends to speed up the data access as you probably know.

[rmerriam]

The big question is how why the reconciliation worked. It shouldn't have, but it did. The Admin has suggested taking a day to redo all the reconciliations for the last year. I'm not quite ready to do that, although I was tempted to pull her leg and suggest reentering all the transactions for the last year.

[NeilZ]

The big question is how why the reconciliation worked. It shouldn't have, but it did. The Admin has suggested taking a day to redo all the reconciliations for the last year. I'm not quite ready to do that, although I was tempted to pull her leg and suggest reentering all the transactions for the last year.

The reconciliation will not stop you from saying 'Done' even if it does not zero out. The system figures that it will tell you that its not zeroed out, but if you still want to say 'done' it will let you.

Many times you really want to do that, as there is a discrepancy you can't find, but you don't want to add an offsetting transaction since its very possible that the next month may clear up the issue when other checks and deposits clear the bank.