Bank Reconciliation Cumming, GA

Reconciliation is the only step in your bookkeeping process that proves your books match reality. The bank statement is the independent third-party record. If the books say December 31 ended at $14,628.42 and the bank says the same number, your books are right. If the numbers do not match, something is wrong, and the reconciliation hunt tells you exactly what.

Without reconciliation, you have no way of knowing whether your reports are accurate. A P&L can look fine and still be wrong if a deposit got posted twice, a transfer between accounts hit only one side, or a returned payment never got reversed. Each of those puts numbers on your reports that are not real.

Most Cumming small business owners we meet have at least one of these issues hiding in their file when we first look at it. The bigger surprise is usually how cleanly it gets fixed once a real reconciliation process starts. Two months in, the books are honest, and they stay that way.

Operating checking and savings accounts at every bank you use. For Cumming small businesses that is usually Truist, Bank of America, United Community, Renasant, Pinnacle Bank, Wells Fargo, or Chase, sometimes a credit union (United Methodist, Delta Community, MembersFirst). All bank feeds run cleanly into QuickBooks, and we tie each one to the matching statement.

Business credit cards (Amex, Chase Ink, Capital One Spark, Brex, Ramp). Each card statement gets reconciled, every charge categorized, and the monthly payment matched correctly between the card and the operating account.

Loan accounts (SBA loans, equipment financing, lines of credit, vehicle loans). Each month we split the payment between principal, interest, and any fees, and confirm the loan balance ties to the lender statement. Lenders catch a lot of mistakes here, especially on amortization rounding and rate changes; reconciliation surfaces them.

Merchant processors (Stripe, Square, PayPal, Shopify Payments, Authorize.Net). These are the trickiest because the deposit you see in the bank is net of fees, refunds, and chargebacks. Reconciliation splits each one into its components so revenue, fees, and refunds all hit the right accounts on your P&L.

If you have been out of reconciliation for months or years, this is the same work as bookkeeping catch up, just sliced to focus only on the bank accounts. We start at the last clean reconciled month, work forward statement by statement, and rebuild the reconciliation history. For most Cumming small businesses with a single operating account and a credit card or two, twelve months of reconciliation rebuilds in one to two weeks.

Multi-entity, multi-bank, or high-volume merchant operations take longer (three to six weeks for a 12-month rebuild is typical). The biggest gating item is almost always how fast you can get bank statements pulled. Most local Cumming-area banks make 24 months of statements available online instantly, which speeds things up considerably.

Reconciliation as part of a monthly bookkeeping engagement is included in the bookkeeping fee. As a standalone monthly add-on, reconciliation is priced per account per month. As a catch-up project for behind books, it is quoted as fixed scope after a quick file diagnostic.

For most Cumming small businesses, paying someone to reconcile is much cheaper than the cost of a year of unreconciled books. Tax preparation fees are higher, lender requests for financials get harder, and the chance of a real costly error sneaking through goes up. Reconciliation is the cheapest accounting insurance you can buy.