Hi All
We have the Bank Statement Import working. Question relates to what to do with unmatched statement lines at the end of the day. Tomorrow we need to import the next day’s statement, but we are unable to have more than one unposted statement open at a time. Hence the question, what does everyone else do with unmatched statement lines?
you create an entry to allocate them to.
Unmatched statement lines would be bank charges I believe, if so, as suggested create them as Bank fee payments and match them manually.
Yes!
I’m told it is quite frequent. Could be a missing remittance from a customer, an incoming payment without reference, a direct debit or bank charges.
Often it can take more than a day to find (or create) the correct allocation.
There is a reluctance to creating a dummy allocation so we can post and then having to reverse it out later. I’m told other systems have functionality to enable more than one unposted statement.
Does anyone else have an approach that doesn’t involve a dummy allocation?
End of the day you need to recognize all such receipts, book them as misc. receipts and park them in some suspense account, and, then map them to unreconciled lines. Once these are identified you can write-off correct invoices to suspense account (or follow credit memo route).
OK, so I’m getting a lot of pushback from the finance team. Has anyone looked at customising the Bank Statement Processing program so we can have more than one open statement at a time (i.e. unposted)? Any reservations with that approach?
You can do that, however, in that case you need to adjust the Bank’s CB equal to Book’s, so that you can reconcile/post and close the month. You need to carry forward bank un-reconcile entries to next month for reconciliation.
As Rakesh said, you would need to manually remove those unreconciled lines from the previous month’s statement and carry them forward to the next month, which in my opinion would defeat the purpose of using the bank reconciliation process. Customizing the bank reconciliation screen to support multiple open statements may not be possible or would require extensive customizations and testing of both the screen and the business objects that are used.
Posting the current statement should not require any “dummy” entries. Bank charges and fees would be entered into Epicor as Bank Adjustments, unallocated cash receipts from customers would be entered as “On Account” in Cash Receipt Entry, and miscellaneous payments as miscellaneous receipts and allocated to a clearing account. These can all be done from within bank statement processing. This may require some process updates but overall this would be working with Epicor the way it was designed, and I personally would push very hard for my Finance team to use Epicor the way it was designed rather than trying to work around it. Just because other systems have this functionality, does not mean Epicor does - or can - do it the same way.
Another option is to borrow some practices from manufacturing and reconcile more often with more frequent and smaller batches. If Finance is doing a month at a time (or more!) then yeah, I can see their pain. Our German office reconciled DAILY in Epicor. It was a smaller batch and it was much easier to find discrepancies than trying to remember what happened six weeks ago. (They also had a lot more direct debits than we do in the US.)
Personally, Veronica (my Sweetie) and I reconcile all of our accounts weekly and it’s much faster than waiting for each monthly statement.
It could save them more time in the long run and less customization to have to upgrade later.