There are a range of different types of balance sheet accounts which are reconcilied in different ways. In order to review and reconcile an account, click on the account from the balance sheet accounts table:
Dormant Accounts
Dormant accounts are defined as an account where the opening and closing balance for the working paper period are both £0.
Dormant accounts will not be shown in the balance sheet accounts table by default. You can view them by clicking "Show dormant accounts":
Dormant accounts are automatically marked as reconciled so there is no further action for you to take:
Managed Accounts
A managed account is defined as an account which is managed by a Briefcase financial close module, for example Prepayments, Income in Advance or Accruals.
Note that fixed asset accounts are also marked as "managed" however these are reconciled in the fixed assets section.
Briefcase automatically adds each item from the relevant tracker to the schedule for these accounts:
In this example, 2 prepayments are on the prepayments tracker. Each gets a line item with the supporting balance being the outstanding amount to be released from the prepayment account per the working paper end date.
The "Balance per schedule" is computed as the sum of the balances for each line item and is compared to the "Balance per GL". If these balances match, the account will be automatically reconciled and there is no further action for you to take. If the balances do not match, you will need to investigate the reason why. You then have 2 options:
Update the tracker: Similar to when there is a difference in fixed assets, you may be able to fix the difference by adding a missing item to the tracker.
Reconcile with a difference: You are also able to reconcile the account manually with a difference by including a justification as to why the account balances do not match.
Reconciling Accounts
The rest of the accounts will need to be reconciled by providing supporting evidence which adds up to match the account balance per the ledger. When initially opening the account details page, you will see something like this:
Add relevant line item(s): You can think of line items as entities which make up the balance of an account. For example, in order to reconcile the VAT account, you might want to add 2 line items: Input VAT & Output VAT.
Line items persist across working paper periods, so once you create a line item, you will see this in the next working paper for this client. This means that you will likely only need to create these line items for the initial working paper, and they will be there to use for all future working papers.
Add support for line items: Once you have added the relevant line items, you now need to add support to them. This is done by clicking "Add support" which will bring up this modal:
Here you can input the amount you would like to support, and an optional note and attachments as evidence. Click "Save" once you're happy with the input. This will persist the support in the schedule.
Reconcile the account: Once support is added for each line item, you will be able to see the difference between the support (shown as "Balance per schedule") and the GL balance:
Click "Reconcile" in the top right to reconcile the account. If the difference is not exactly £0.00, a modal will appear when clicking "Reconcile" to ask for some additional information:
You are still able to reconcile an account with a difference however you need to provide a justification as to why the account is still able to be reconciled.
For the future working paper periods, you will then see the prior period supports shown in the schedule table:
