Keeping Your Business Thriving Through Healthy Accounting
Why Balance Your Checkbook?
Even today, when much (if not all) of your transaction information is available with the click of a button, it’s still a good idea to maintain a record of your transactions and regularly balance that record.
Balancing your checkbook, which is also known as reconciling your account, is basically about making sure that the records you have kept for your financial transactions match those the bank lists on your statement. There are several reasons for keeping such a record and balancing it regularly:
Back when paper checks were more common, it could take quite some time for any one check to clear. Making sure you recorded checks as you wrote them and reconciled your account with the bank’s statement ensured that you were never caught flat-footed when an old check finally cleared.
Though rare, banks do sometimes make mistakes, and regularly balancing your checkbook allows you to catch such errors in a timely fashion.
You also can catch merchant errors more quickly if you reconcile regularly. If a vendor charges you the wrong amount for a purchase, you may not otherwise know if you don’t balance your account at least once a month.
Keeping a record of your banking transactions can help you track your spending, making budgeting a simpler process.
It also is easier to identify problems, such as missed automatic payments, incorrectly assessed fees, fraudulent charges and even your own mathematical mistakes, when you have a regularly balanced checkbook.
How to Balance a Checkbook
Balancing your checkbook used to be a chore reserved for a specific time each month: after receiving your monthly paper statement from the bank. With the statement in hand, you would compare the transactions you had listed by hand in your paper checkbook register with those shown in your bank statement.
Although this chore may look a bit different currently than it did our parents’ day, the basics of the job remain the same. If you have never before balanced your checkbook, you need to start by recording your transactions—starting with your bank balance:
Look up the “current available balance” in your checking account. You can find this information on either your bank’s website or through its mobile app. If you’re using a paper checkbook register, you’ll record this number in the top spot above the spaces you use to log your transactions.
Record any pending transactions that you know are coming but have not yet cleared. This includes debits and credits, as well as any checks you may have written that have not yet been cashed. You will write down the date of the transaction and a brief description and, in the case of checks, the check number.
For each debit, you’ll subtract the amount of the transaction from your balance. For each credit, you’ll add the amount. You’ll continue doing this until you have recorded all your transactions.
Don’t forget to account for any fees that you pay and any interest that you earn.
As you continue to make transactions, record them in your check register so you have a running tally of your debits, credits and total balance.
About once every two weeks (or more often), log on to view your bank account and compare your bank’s total withdrawals and deposits with your own records. If they match, then you have a balanced checkbook.
So what do you do if your numbers and the bank’s numbers don’t align? That’s when it’s time to backtrack through your records and the bank’s transaction history to see where the discrepancy is. Perhaps you forgot to record a transaction or you transposed a couple of numbers. The only way to discover the error is to go back to the last time your checkbook was balanced and work your way forward.
This is one of the reasons it’s a good idea to balance your checkbook more often than once a month, especially if you are newly adopting this financial task. You will have fewer transactions to comb through if you balance once a week or once every two weeks.
Balancing Your Checkbook Is Essential
Though both parts of the word “checkbook” are quickly becoming meaningless, being able to reconcile your accounts will always be an important part of financial health. Plus, with the addition of digital banking services like automatic bill payments and mobile deposits, it’s critical to know when your money is in motion.
Not only does tracking your transactions help ensure that you are aware of how (and when) money is flowing in and out of your account, but also it gives you the baseline you need to detect problems and plan ahead financially. It may be that only old-school account holders still record and reconcile paper checkbooks by hand. But there are a number of options available to help you record and balance your accounting in order to stay on top of your finances.