Part 5. Balancing Accounts

To keep all your bank account information current, you must reconcile your accounts. Reconciling an account is the process of checking your paper bank statement against your account register to make sure the balance matches. It is a good practice to reconcile your Quicken bank accounts each month when you receive a paper statement.

When your bank or financial institution executes a transaction, such as paying a check or depositing interest, that transaction has cleared. Correspondingly, you must mark these cleared transactions from your paper statement as cleared in Quicken.

The goal in reconciling an account is to reach a zero balance when comparing the paper statement to your Quicken account. However, errors do occur and you must take steps to correct any mistakes. After investigating why the balance does not equal zero, you may need to edit some transactions or add missing transactions, which can be done within the reconciliation process.

At the end of the reconciliation process, you can generate a report and view an account summary.

The tasks in this part of the book teach you how to handle each phase of the reconciliation. Although the tasks in this section of the book focus on reconciling your checking or savings accounts, you can also apply these same techniques to reconcile other types of accounts in Quicken.