Remember the days of balancing your checkbook or credit card with nothing more than a sharp pencil and a
basic calculator? Crunching the numbers of your business expenditures each month could take hours and had to be checked and double checked numerous times to avoid expensive errors. Many of us put off balancing our credit cards and checkbooks until the last possible moment – if only to retain some small amount of sanity. It's things like this that really make you appreciate new developments in bookkeeping technology – such as the QuickBooks reconciliation feature.
Instead of tapping away at your calculator for hours on end, this simple feature allows you to balance your accounts in minutes so there’s no excuse for waiting. It saves you precious time, and it can also save you a great deal of money.
Essentially, this feature allows you to double check your deposits and credits against your bank or credit card statement. Simply open “Banking” from the startup screen, then click on “Reconcile” and enter in the statement date and end balance. Use the statement to check off each item in the “checks and payments” column. When complete, the amount in the right bottom corner should say “0.” If not, there is an error in the records or in the statement.
What many business owners fail to realize is that banks and credit card companies can make errors too. Often these errors go unnoticed and can add up to a rather large amount of lost money. Generally you only have about 30 to 60 days to contact credit card companies and banks to ask that the errors be reversed, so it is important to catch them early. By using the QuickBooks reconciliation feature to balance your accounts in a timely manner, you are much more likely to catch errors in enough time to have them changed.
All in all, this handy aspect of the QuickBooks program can be a real lifesaver. However, in order to save even more time, you may want to hire a Salt Lake City Bookkeeping professional. Our educated and thorough experts can save you more time and money than even the best program available.
What benefits have you found from the automation of bookkeeping?