Is banking reconciliation a headache for you?

Joepaul K John
Writers at Insight
Published in
2 min readJan 31, 2020
Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

Is Banking reconciliation a Headache for you?

Do you have Fixed assets in your books?

Are you a part of a small or medium enterprise?

Below is a comparison of the features of these points between Quickbooks Online (QBO) and Xero. As you might have already recognized, these two are among the well-known applications available for online accounting solutions.

Both the applications can be linked with most of the Banks and have the feeds from the banks flown directly to the application.

Given this, a comparison from this point alone is done below:

Self Learning: Both applications can learn from the previous reconciliations done and suggest the ledger accounts for future transactions.

Doubtful of a transaction? Are you doubtful of the ledger or the category of an expense? Well, Xero allows having the comments placed on the transaction for a later review by the person concerned within Xero. Whereas in QBO you might need to have a separate tracking mechanism.

Location wise tracking: From a banking reconciliation user interface (UI) QBO doesn’t allow you to split a single transaction to multiple locations. While Xero makes this much effortless from the banking UI. Xero doesn’t limit its users with the number of locations that can be added to track. It does limit the types of categories tracked at two.

Whichever application is used, it is advised to compare the balances in books of accounts with the physical statements to make sure that everything in the bank has flown correctly to books.

Fixed assets:

QBO doesn’t allow a separate tracking mechanism for a fixed asset. It records fixed assets like any other transaction and a separate calculation of depreciation is needed at the end of each month.

Whereas Xero has a separate fixed asset register and has multiple options of depreciation also preloaded. This allows you to track the assets and select the relevant depreciation rates. One can also add any method and customize it as required also within Xero.

Once this is done we just need to run depreciation at the end of each month and the correct depreciation flows into the books without the need for any manual calculation.

Over to you:

How do you handle bank reconciliations at your office?

What tools do you use to get your reconciliation done?

Is there a better way we can do reconciliations?

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