Bank reconciliation — proving the books agree with the bank

Two records of the same money. Reconciling is proving they agree.

The statement is the bank's record of what actually moved. Your books are your record of what you meant to happen. Reconciling walks the statement line by line and pairs each one with the entry that explains it. Whatever pairs is cleared; whatever does not is a real question — a payment nobody recorded, a receipt that never arrived, a charge you did not know about.

Where it lives

There is no menu item called "reconciliation". Everything is inside one screen:

On a phone the More sheet calls it Books. Access needs canAccessSettings — a reports-only user cannot open it at all, even though they are allowed to read the data.

Two things must exist or the tab has nothing to show.

1. The books must be switched on. If they are not, the whole screen is replaced by a Set up my books card. Pressing it seeds the chart of accounts, posts opening balances and backfills the ledger, then reports "Books ready — posted N journal entries."

2. At least one bank or cash account. More → Bank & Cash Accounts → Add account (name, bank/cash, bank name, branch, last 4, IFSC, opening balance). Without one the Banking tab says:

Each account's card then shows its book balance, the last statement imported, and a pill — amber "N to reconcile" or green "All matched".

Three steps, and the middle one is not what it looks like.

Banking tab → the account's card → Import statement.

Importing the PDF instead

Most people never find the CSV download, because the bank's app leads with a PDF. Deetzo will read the PDF — but it is worth knowing what that means, because it is not the same act as reading a CSV.

There is no parser per bank, and there could not be: every bank's PDF looks different and they change. Instead the table is found from the geometry of the page — the dates are wherever the dates are, the money columns are wherever the amounts line up, and the description is the space in between. That works on a statement the bank generated. It cannot work on a scan or a photograph, which has no text in it at all, and it says so rather than guessing.

Two more things it does on its own: a password-protected statement asks for the password (used once, stored nowhere), and a bank that prints money in before money out is noticed by comparing against the statement's own totals, and the columns are swapped with a note saying so.

What it refuses

Note for spreadsheets: an XLSX is read from its first sheet only. If your bank exports a cover sheet first, save the transactions sheet as CSV instead.

Worth understanding, because it explains every match you disagree with.

For each statement line Deetzo looks for book entries on that bank account and scores them. Two things are absolute — get either wrong and there is no pair at all:

• The amount must be equal to the paisa, and in the mirrored direction (money in on the statement ↔ a debit in the books).
• The dates must be within seven days of each other.

Everything else adds confidence, and appears on screen as blue chips you can read: same day, 2d apart, reference, party, unique amount, 3 receipts.

A line is only matched automatically when one candidate scores well and clearly beats the runner-up. Anything close is left for you. A deposit covering several receipts is found too, but deliberately scored below the automatic threshold — it always asks a human, and the line says so: "A deposit of N receipts — check the list before matching."

Four actions, and one button that behaves differently from the others.

Banking tab → Reconcile. Each open line shows its best suggestion with the entry's narration and its signal chips.

Lines with nothing to pair against say so plainly: "Nothing in the books matches this line." That is not a failure of the tool — it is the finding. Something happened at the bank that your books have never heard of, and somebody has to enter it (§07).

The header counters, and what they do and do not mean.

The things that will waste an afternoon if nobody warns you.

1. Only the latest statement is reconcilable. Import a newer file and the previous statement's leftover lines can no longer be opened — while still counting towards the amber badge, which then never clears. Finish a statement before importing the next one.
2. The months must overlap. Matching only looks a week either side of each line and loads the books around the statement's period. A September statement against April entries matches nothing — and looks like the feature is broken when it is working exactly as designed.
3. Undeposited Funds. A receipt, payment or expense recorded without choosing a bank account posts to Undeposited Funds. It is never a candidate for any statement line, because as far as the books are concerned it never touched a bank. If a line stubbornly has no match, check whether the entry has a bank account on it.
4. Set aside is an accounting decision. Nothing asks for a reason and nothing chases it. Use it for lines that genuinely belong to another period or another account — not as a way to make the number go green.
5. Two identical transactions on one day are told apart by their order within a single file. Re-exporting the same day in a different order can make the second import skip a legitimate repeat.

Two of these change how you have to work, so read them before you start.

Also still to come: a live book balance and a Reconcile button on the Bank & Cash Accounts screen; OFX and QIF import; matching several statement lines to one book entry; a cash physical-count flow; a books health check for unreconciled items older than sixty days; and a sweep for stranded Undeposited Funds.

The page to keep open the first few months.