balancing between reports

[kimvdh]

on my bank reconciling report it shows an amount available (after outstanding)
and on my balance sheet report it shows the amount in my checking accnt
the 2 amounts are not the same (1075.7 more in bank than what shows available on the balance sheet report)
shouldn't they be equal?

[JohnDMeyers]

Yes. And that's the "fun" of bank reconciliation. Making them equal.

At least it appears you have more money than you think you do.

Gook luck!

[kimvdh]

Since my bank reconciling report is balanced that means i must have entered some thing wrong or missed entering it somewhere right? but isnt everything connected in PC? how can 1 report in the program be correct and 1 be wrong?

[kimvdh]

i have never compared the 2 reports before... so i just went back and every month doesnt match! i thought if the bank reconciliation report had the adjusted bank balance = to the account 1110 balance, that all was well with my accounting.
may has $824.83 more in bank than the balance sheet says
june has 1011.38 more



our fiscal year end is Sept 30, can i just do some sort of entry in Sept to make the balance sheet amount for 1110 be equal to the actual in bank (obviously the bank is the one that is correct) and start balanced in oct?

is there a check list anywhere on what to make sure you do every month, in what order?
what reports to run before doing something so you find mistakes before its too late???

[Zorak]

If the reconcile screen shows you balanced to zero difference between the "Account 110 balance" and "Adjusted bank balance" then you have done it correctly.

There are various reasons why that balance will not match what's on the Balance Sheet. The biggest one being that the Balance Sheet only looks at transactions posted through a particular month, whereas the reconcile process either shows you all posted transactions or cuts off the list of transactions as of the date of the bank statement.

Another common reason is transactions that were entered during the Accounting Setup Assistant as "outstanding" as of the starting point of the Accounting system in PowerChurch. Those are transactions that are not actually on the books, affecting balances. They are only there to allow you to reconcile that first month or two.

[F12Mahon]

Another common reason is transactions that were entered during the Accounting Setup Assistant as "outstanding" as of the starting point of the Accounting system in PowerChurch. Those are transactions that are not actually on the books, affecting balances. They are only there to allow you to reconcile that first month or two.

Will those past transactions stop affecting reports when the year they are in is closed? How can we retrieve the amounts for those of us that are obsessive when off by even a penny?

[JohnDMeyers]

Will those past transactions stop affecting reports when the year they are in is closed?
No. They will still be there in the new year.


How can we retrieve the amounts for those of us that are obsessive when off by even a penny?

Put a dollar in the offering and do this:
DB 01-1110-000 checking $0.99
CR 01-5910-000 misc income $0.99

Sometimes, it's worth a dollar.

[mcdonaldunit]

I wanted to add my .02 in solving this problem. we spent hours and hours trying to figure this out.
First off, we had an easy solution to this problem one month. We were closing October. The checks that were written with issue dates in the first few days of November, but for invoices in the accounting month of October, totalled exactly the difference between the two reports.

Then this past month we had a real problem. The reports were off by a seemingly meaningless number.
After hours and hours, we went back into the Account Reconciliation screen, even though I had already reconciled the bank account through the end of the month and gotten a number equal to the number on the bank statement. We started clearing miscellaneous transactions from earlier in the year; ones where the debit and credit sides equalled each other but we had not bothered to clear them off the reconciliation screen. For some reason, going into reconciliation a second time and clearing some of those transactions yielded a number that matched with the balance sheet.

We still have no idea what happened . We are guessing/wondering if I ran the reconciliation report first and then added some transactions to the checking account that affected the balance sheet.... or if there was an issue in Powerchurch. There isn't any logic to it.
Anyhow, hope that helps.

[JohnDMeyers]

When you say "matched the number on the Balance Sheet", to me that situation only occurs when there are no outstanding checks or deposits beyond what it shown on the Bank Statement.

It really doesn't matter if the Balance Sheet shows an amount that is different from the last Bank Statement. The purpose of the reconciliation window is to eliminate those transactions that have not yet made it to the bank.

Am I missing something here?

[NeilZ]

The balance sheet and bank reconciliation report will most never (if ever) come out to be the same. This thread explains why:

https://www.powerchurch.com/forum/viewt ... f=3&t=6250

[mcdonaldunit]

Thank you for these comments. I appreciate the followup. I am going to print this out and put it in my file.
We hire an outside professional accountancy firm to review and balance our books as we had a period with no professional accountancy within the church. The accountant's procedure for proving the balance sheet is to have it equal to the bank statement. Obviously PowerChurch does not have a way to meet this requirement.
She has taught me to do a transaction to ensure that this happens wherein she posts checks for services rendered in the prior month to accounts payable for the last day of the month being closed, then reversing that transaction and re-posting it to the current month.

[JohnDMeyers]

Actually, that's what the reconciliation report in PowerChurch does, except you don't have to post and undo post.

The reconciliation report shows the bank balance, minus outstanding deposits, plus outstanding checks, and it shows a balance of zero.

We include the PowerChurch report in our bank statement file, with signature(s) of the person(s) doing the reconciliation (which is me).

And I agree with you. This is a very important document.