Before you begin to do your own Checking Account Reconciliation Worksheet, make sure that you have prepared yourself with the skills and knowledge that is needed to handle this process. Let’s begin.
First, you need to know that account reconciliation is much more than just a boring acronym. In fact, it is the most important term on the books. You could say, account reconciliation is like the heart of banking. And the business of banking is much more than just a business.
Because there are many laws and regulations pertaining to banking, account reconciliation must be included in the operating procedures for each and every bank. You can not go through it by yourself. That’s why the agents and the account specialists who work in banks are training to go through checking account reconciliation themselves, and they are generally very good at it. But you do not have to be a certified accountant to do this. You just need to be familiar with the different aspects of banking and be able to describe the things on your Worksheet to a point where the supervisor or the bank manager can be properly trained to do his/her part.
Let me share with you that you do not need training in accounting to accomplish this. All that you need to know is how the language of accounting works. You need to know how interest and taxes work. And you need to know how to write the terms and conditions that the bank managers are very good at writing in their reporting.
In fact, the bank manager does the accounting part of the account reconciliation because it’s what he does best. He usually has a written agreement with his customers and many banks will provide that to you if you ask for it. The bank may even send one out to you before you open an account. It will provide you with all the documents, the bank needs to prove your financial history, your income, and your expenses. If you don’t have any of those, ask them to send you some for you to review.
Once you have all of that, you can review your bank’s financial accounts and ask the bank to include all of your receipts and you expenses into your accounting. Then the bank will begin compiling everything together. It will then examine these numbers and put them into a report for you to review later.
The next step will be to find the difference between your fixed and variable interest rates and compare them with the interest rates that the current customer is paying. If the difference is not too large, you can count on the bank making changes to that interest rate.
However, if the difference is too large, then they will raise the interest rate for the current customer. If they do this, then you may want to compare the new rate to the minimum rate that was set for the new customer.
