The most common and easy procedure nowadays is opting for payment through banks by depositing cheque and cash in it. This is because banks are considered the safest and monetary dealing through it is found to be more convenient. Opening a current account in a bank is fitting for a company where there is no restriction on the number of times of deposits and withdrawals. It is befitting because only a deposit slip or pay in slip is required to deposit drafts, cheques or cash; and with the help of cheques, withdrawals can be made. In this case, using cheques is mandatory.
Every banking transaction in a company is recorded in a cash book under bank column or three columns. But in case of abank, they record transaction details of every customer associated with them in their ledger accounts. If stated in a simplified way, a customer composing his cash book and the bank recording those details have the same transaction records. Therefore it is very important that the displayed bank balance should exactly be same as exhibited in the ledger accounts of bank and cash book of their customer.
Ledger accounts in order to be inaccessible to customers, banks maintain them in utter secrecy. What they do is create a resemblance of the ledger accounts where customers can see records of their banking transactions. This supplied copy by a bank is known as account statement of a customer or pass book in the general term. It helps the customers to know and analogize the entries with the column cash book of the bank and verify their bank balance and the records of it.
If stating in a theoretical term, the apt scenario between a bank and a company regarding cash book prepared by the former and maintained by the latter should have similar bank balance records of the transactions. But when it is analyzed practically, this theoretical aspect is completely different from real scenario. The pass book and cash book have dissimilar records of bank balance.
Due to this difference in balance records, the responsible factors for this difference are asked to banks by companies. The bank then creates a statement to highlight the differences which are known as bank reconciliation statements.
Defining Bank Reconciliation Statements
As stated earlier, bank reconciliation statements are created by banks in order to find the variation of balance records in pass book and cash book and harmonize its differences between both displayed balances.
In case of pass book or a customer statement of their individual account, the bank creates it and sends it directly to their customer of its information. But when it is about cash book, it is kept and maintained by the company itself. This states that both the balance books are with the bank’s customers which they can see, analyze and check with their own maintained records.
At frequent intervals, a company composes bank reconciliation statements. An essential and foremost part of composing bank reconciliation statement is transaction recognition which results in the variation of balances between pass book and cash book. The statements can be created according to their number of transactions taking place in the company. The frequency of statement preparation can be of every month or week or even it could be daily.
Links of Previous Main Topic:-
- Adjustments additional information in preparation of final accounts
- Balance sheet in final accounts without adjustments
- Meaning of trial balance
- Balancing of ledger accounts
- Subsidiary books or sub division of journal
- The concept of debit and credit
- Origin of transaction
- Meaning of gaap
- Book keeping
Links of Next Book-Keeping Topics:-
- Need and importance of bank reconciliation statements
- Preparation of bank reconciliation statements
- Steps for preparation of bank reconciliation statements
- Important notes and explanations regarding preparation
- Cash book with discount column
- Cash book with discount and bank column or three column cash book
