Main Content
Bank reconciliation is a fundamental task for any finance or accounting team. It involves comparing the company’s recorded bank balance to the actual balance reported by the bank. This process ensures all transactions are accounted for and helps identify discrepancies such as errors or fraud. But, why is this process so important?
Reconciliation is typically performed on a regular basis—monthly, bimonthly, or even daily for companies with high transaction volumes. Businesses with fewer transactions may reconcile quarterly or annually. Regardless of frequency, having a standardized template helps ensure consistency, accuracy, and efficiency with financial reporting.
If you're using Excel, setting up a clear reconciliation template can save you time and reduce errors.
We're going to show you how to build one in three steps.
Start by clearly labeling each row and column in your spreadsheet. These labels should correspond to the information provided on your bank statement, such as:
Date
Description
Reference/Check Number
Deposit
Withdrawal
Balance
If you're importing a CSV file from your bank, you'll often see more fields than necessary. Filter out the excess data and only keep what's relevant to your reconciliation.
Once your fields are labeled, apply formulas to identify and reconcile discrepancies between your internal records and your bank statement.
Here are three key Excel functions used for reconciliation:
VLOOKUP: Helps match transaction values between two data sets (e.g., company records vs. bank statement).
SUMIF: Adds values that meet a specific condition, such as totaling deposits for a certain date or batch.
COUNTIF: Counts the number of times a value appears—great for spotting duplicate entries.
These functions allow you to build an automated reconciliation model that flags unmatched items and totals balances efficiently.
Sort your rows to isolate unmatched transactions and highlight reconciling items such as:
Outstanding checks
Deposits in transit
Bank fees or interest not yet recorded in your ledger
After resolving discrepancies, save the final report and upload it to your company’s central database or cloud storage for access by your accounting team and auditors.
You can set functions in your Excel template to automatically reconcile banks with functions such as VLOOKUP, SUMIF and COUNTIF. VLOOKUP checks bank records and quickly matches them against bank statement debits to alert you of any unchecked records.
Image Source: Vena
You can then identify all unmatched transactions as reconciliation entries in depositor records and bank statements. The SUMIF function can match all deposits to bank statements for account reconciliation using a deposit lot reference.
Companies usually deposit all collections in bulk with banks as it isn't feasible to deposit them into the bank individually. The SUMIF function will quickly match and add up all bank transactions using batch numbers to match depositor records and bank statements.
Lastly, the COUNTIF function recognises multiple or duplicate records of the same transaction. It does this by counting every transaction that meets the criterion. It helps uncover accounting and banking errors.
Increase the speed of bank reconciliation by using a Vena Bank Reconciliation Template. We designed our templates to streamline accounting tasks and ensure report accuracy.
Whether it's time to close out the week, month, quarter or year, Vena's Account Reconciliation Software will make the process easier. Get a central database that integrates with your ERP, GL systems and the rest of your existing tech stack.
Streamline workflows with our pre-configured solutions for all your standard and specialized reconciliations. Our software tracks every submission and times stamps them for improved accuracy. Provide your auditors with the detailed audit trail reports they need.
Save time, increase transparency and track all reconciliations with a central template. Make sure that submitters and reviewers are on the same page. See which accounts need review and reconciling, track account balances and reconcile amounts.
Eliminate common reconciliation errors with templates designed by finance professionals for finance professionals. Download any of our free Excel templates to see how Vena can help streamline your entire finance department.
As Vice President, FP&A at Vena, Tom Seegmiller is responsible for strategic finance, including business partnering, budgeting and forecasting, with a focus on optimizing enterprise value. Tom is instrumental in the formulation of the financial narrative for the executive leadership team, investors and board members. Tom has always had a focus on driving enhanced business decisions through leveraging financial and operational data. He is an experienced finance executive, having most recently led the finance team at Miovision Technologies. Prior to that, he was in senior FP&A leadership roles at OpenText. Tom enjoys golfing, skiing, exercising and traveling in his spare time, but most importantly, he loves spending time with his wife and daughter.
