In this article, you will learn:

•How to choose the proper Bank Reconciliation field to represent dollar values

 

Required

•Review Debit versus Credit

 

Overview

 

Bank Reconciliation requires four fields be mapped for any imported data: Date, CheckNumber, and Amount. However, Amount really refers to a category of fields that can be mapped for this purpose.  These fields are:

 

1.Amount

2.Amount_Reverse_Sign

3.Amount and Sign

4.Debit and Credit (always mapped as a pair)

 

In making the selection, the main criteria is: Do these values have the correct sign? In other words, if all the transactions have positive amount values, do all of them increase the account balance? If some decrease the balance, are they negative values? If the answer to both is yes, Amount is probably the right choice. If no, you should explore the other options.

 

Amount

 

Choose Amount when data in a file is both positive and negative.

 

However, the following must be true about the data:

✓Positive increases the account balance

✓Negative decreases the account balance

 

For example, if you are mapping bank data, debit transactions (voided checks and deposits) must be negative and credit transactions must be positive.

 

If true, map the field as Amount

 

Amount_Reverse_Sign

 

Amount_Reverse_Sign is exactly the opposite of Amount: it will reverse the sign of the data when it is imported. This can be necessary if the transactions that should increase an account balance are negative values in the file and vice-versa.

 

For example, if you are mapping bank data, debit transactions (voided checks and deposits) should be negative and credit transactions should be positive.  If they are reversed, map this field to correct the sign instead of having to manually edit the data outside of Bank Reconciliation and then import it.

 

Sign

 

The Amount field includes both the value of the transaction (how much money) as well as the sign of the data (positive or negative).  In some situations, the source data will provide you with amounts that are all absolute, but a second field will tell you the sign of the data.  For example, a data file might look like the following:

 

67.22        credit

41.14        credit

99.18        debit

56.10        debit

 

Map the first column as Amount and map the second column as Sign.

 

In the second column, the word "credit" identifies a transaction that should be treated as a credit transaction and "debit" identifies a debit transaction.  See Debit versus Credit for more information.

 

By default, Bank Reconciliation uses "debit" and "credit" as the text identifying those respective transactions. See Changing debit and credit text to enter text identifiers specific to your data.

 

Debit and Credit

 

Debit and Credit are used when the source data splits the amounts into two separate fields, one for debit transactions and one for credit transactions.  This effectively splits the data into what should be positive values and negative values.

 

By default, Bank Reconciliation interprets the text "debit" and "credit" as referring to those respective transactions.  See Changing debit and credit text to enter text identifiers specific to your data.

 

For more information on debit and credit as they relate to sign, see Debit versus Credit.