Bank Reconciliation

Match recorded transactions against bank and credit card statements to verify the books are accurate, complete, and audit-ready.

Read these when needed

• Read references/MATCHING-RULES.md when deciding what can be auto-matched versus escalated.
• Run scripts/reconciliation_summary.py when you already have reconciliation records and need a deterministic matched/unmatched summary.

Why reconciliation matters

The bank knows what actually happened. Your books reflect what you think happened. Reconciliation finds the gap between the two. Without it, you can't trust any number in your financial statements — not your cash balance, not your profit, not your tax liability.

Most small business accounting errors are discovered during reconciliation: duplicate entries, missed transactions, incorrect amounts, transactions booked to the wrong account, and timing differences between when you record something and when the bank processes it. The IRS expects reconciled books. An unreconciled set of books is one of the first things an auditor flags.

What you need

Two data sources, covering the same time period (usually one calendar month):