Introduction to Account Reconciliation
Introduction to Account Reconciliation
Account Reconciliation is the platform module focused on managing the monthly accounting close. With it, the accounting team reconciles trial balance amounts, explains differences, attaches supporting documentation, runs the approval workflow, and generates auditable reconciliation reports. This article is the starting point: it explains the concepts and the workflow, and points you to what comes next.
What the module solves
Instead of manual work in spreadsheets and emails, you get a single workspace to analyze each account group, a standardized Prepare, Review, and Approve flow, automatic reconciliation between Source and Support, and an audit trail with owners, deadlines, attachments, and the reconciliation cover sheet in PDF.
Essential concepts
The data structure follows the chart of accounts:
Business: the business unit (head office or business unit).
Company: an establishment (head office or branch) that is part of a business. It appears in reports.
Account Group: a folder that organizes and groups accounts by the same topic. It is recommended to keep only a few per business, around 20, to make navigation easier.
Account: the chart of accounts record. It sits inside an account group and can be analyzed on its own or together with others.
Closing Group: an account analysis that brings together more than one account. That is all it is: when you analyze several accounts together, they form a closing group; when you analyze a single account on its own, the analysis is the account itself. The analysis is the module's work unit.
The values compared in the close are:
Source: the sum of the trial balance entries, the official balance coming from the ERP.
Support: the sum of the journal entries that justify the Source balance.
Difference: Source minus Support.
Unexplained Difference: the part of the difference that has not yet been justified by adjustments.
And each closing group carries a status: Reconciled (no difference or within the threshold), Justified (difference explained by adjustments), Unexplained (difference still not justified), or Pending (month's trial balance not loaded).
Important: approval, cover sheet, comments, attachments, and explanatory note belong to the analysis — to the closing group, when it brings together multiple accounts —, not to each account. Accounts have their own balances, but they inherit the approval flow and status from the analysis.
How the close works
A month's cycle always follows the same logic:
Load the trial balance, which populates the Source balances.
Enter the supports and adjustments that justify each balance.
Track the status, recalculated in real time as entries come in.
Move the approval workflow forward (Prepare, Review, Approve), with an owner and deadline at each stage.
Generate the reconciliation cover sheet in PDF when finished.
Where to go next
Account Analysis: the list of accounts.
How to reconcile an account.
Approval flow and Reconciliation Cover Sheet.
Dashboard and Consolidated View.
Businesses, Chart of Accounts, and owners.
Bulk import.