Over the next few months I’m going to give quick tips about the bank reconciliation feature in QuickBooksTM. There are a lot of wonderful tools that are part of the bank reconciliation feature and learning just a couple of them can make your life a little easier.

One of the little known features in the bank reconciliation feature of QuickBooksTM is the “Locate Discrepancies” button that you see when you are entering your bank statement information. It’s in the first screen, at the bottom, after clicking on “Bank Reconciliation” from the Home Page or from the Banking Menu.

Since it is so easy to delete or change transactions in QuickBooksTM, this button can come in very handy. You would want to click on this button if the beginning balance from your bank statement does not match the beginning balance when you begin your bank reconciliation. If you click on this button, it will alert you to what has changed, in your records, since you last reconciled your bank statement in QuickBooksTM. Using this information, you can re-input the deleted/changed items and clear them through your current bank reconciliation, which will get your back on track.

If what is showing in the discrepancies window is something that really should not be part of your records, then re-input the data as stated above and then correct it in the current period so that your bank reconciliations for past periods always remain correct.