Reconciling unchanged bank statements

Just recently, I worked on a case with a partner, whose client had a checkbook setup. For the past serveral months, the bank account associated to the checkbook has had no transaction activity. The client still receives a bank statement each month with no transactions.

When the client would try to enter the cutoff date information into the Reconcile Bank Statment window, even though the difference is zero, the system is not letting them reconcile the statement.

Reconcile Bank Statement window

They keep receiving a message that they need to mark the items they want to clear.

Select Bank Transctions window - error when attempting to reconcile

As a result of not being able to complete the reconcile, the Last Reconciled Date field is not being updated on the Checkbook Maintenance window.

Checkbook Maintenance window

To overcome this issue, we had the client enter both an interest income and an other expense adjustment for a penny ($0.01), as shown below:

Reconcile Bank Adjustments

Once we returned to the Reconcile Bank Statements window and clicked on the Reconcile button, the process went through. Since Microsoft Dynamics GP does not post zero balance transactions to the same account in the General Ledger, then we were able to effectively not affect the GL. The added bonus, of course, and the problem needed to be solved - updating the last reconciled date on the checkbook - was taken care of with this workaround.

Reconciled Checkbook

Of course, we could have made the changes directly in SQL by updating the Checkbook Master table (CM00100), but that would have left no audit trail of the reconciliation for the accounting department. As for those pennies... they are just that, pennies. The adjustments were documented with notes that explained clearly that they served just as a workaround so auditors would not throw a fit.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
IntellPartners, LLC
http://www.IntellPartners.com/