Introduction
Introduction
Bank Reconciliation in Empress is a critical feature that allows businesses to ensure their financial records align with their actual bank statements. This process is particularly important when dealing with cheque payments, which often take time to clear. With Empress, you can seamlessly synchronize your bank statements and journal entries using transaction dates.
Understanding Bank Reconciliation
Bank Reconciliation refers to the process of comparing your company’s internal financial records (as shown in Empress) with your official bank statement. Any discrepancies between these two records could indicate errors, fraud, or unrecorded transactions which can be corrected using this feature.
To access Bank Reconciliation in Empress, go to:
Home > Accounting > Banking and Payments > Update Bank Transaction Date
How to Update Bank Transaction Dates
Keeping your bank transaction dates updated is an easy process. Here’s how you can do it:
- Go to Bank Clearance.
- Choose your Bank Account.
- Select the relevant date range.
- Choose to include reconciled entries and POS transactions.
- Click on the Get Payment Entries button to display all the “Bank Voucher” type entries.
- Update the Clearance Date for each entry and click on the Update Clearance Date button to synchronize your bank statements and entries.
Empress’s Bank Reconciliation Tools
Empress provides you with two types of reconciliation tools:
- A manual tool for setting clearance dates against payment entries, sales invoice payments, or journal entries.
- A semi-automatic tool to clear bank transactions against payment entries, sales, purchase invoices payments, journal entries, or expense claims.
Manual Bank Reconciliation
To access this tool, go to:
Accounts > Banking and Payments > Bank Reconciliation Statement
This report will show whether your Empress ‘Balance as per bank’ matches your Bank Account Statement. If the values align, it means all bank entries have the correct Clearance Date. If there’s a discrepancy, it could indicate that the Clearance Date for some bank entries needs to be updated.
Semi-automatic Bank Reconciliation
This tool is a two-step process:
- Adding Bank Transactions into Empress via Bank Statement Import or Bank Account Synchronization.
- Reconciling the Bank Statement.
Bank Statement Import
You can upload your bank statement into Empress. Just ensure that your bank statement includes the date, debit/credit, and currency details for each transaction. To upload, go to:
Accounting > Bank Statement > Bank Statement Import
After selecting your Company and Bank Account, attach the Bank Statement, map the columns, and start the import process. The Bank Transactions will be generated and progress will be displayed.
Bank Account Synchronization
Empress allows automatic bank account synchronization using Plaid, so all your bank transactions are imported into Empress automatically.
Automatic Party Matching for Bank Transactions
You can choose to enable automatic party matching, so that parties are automatically assigned in Bank Transactions. You can also enable Fuzzy Matching for approximate matching, which is helpful when the party’s Bank Account isn’t registered in the system. Once enabled, party matching will occur automatically when submitting the Bank Transaction.
Reconciling the Bank Statement
After importing all your bank transactions into Empress, you can reconcile them with your existing vouchers by navigating to:
Accounting > Bank Statement > Bank Reconciliation Tool
Select your Company, Bank Account, and the Bank Statement dates, ensuring the opening balance in Empress matches your Bank Statement’s opening balance. Enter the Closing Balance of the Bank Statement, then match or create vouchers to make the difference amount zero.
Conclusion
Bank Reconciliation in Empress is a valuable tool that simplifies financial record-keeping, ensures accuracy, and helps prevent fraud. By following this user-friendly guide, business users can effectively manage their bank reconciliation process for smoother, more reliable financial management.
For further support or resources, consult the Empress user guide or reach out to our customer support team.