Reconcile every month, right after the bank statement closes. For most banks that means within the first few days of the following month. This applies to every bank account and every credit card you use for business. If you have three accounts, that’s three reconciliations each month.

Monthly reconciliation works because it matches your bank’s reporting cycle. Your statement shows a clear beginning balance, ending balance, and every transaction in between. QuickBooks compares what you recorded against what the bank recorded. When those numbers match, you know your books are accurate. When they don’t, you have a manageable window of transactions to review instead of months of unknowns.

What does reconciliation actually catch? Duplicate entries, missing transactions, bank fees you forgot to record, deposits that posted differently than expected, and sometimes outright fraud. It also catches mistakes in categorization that would throw off your financial statements. A $3,000 payment to a vendor that got recorded as $300 will show up immediately during reconciliation. Let that sit for six months and it becomes much harder to track down.

Skipping even one month makes the next reconciliation harder. Skip two or three months and you’re no longer doing routine maintenance. You’re doing catch-up bookkeeping, which takes significantly more time and effort. The longer you wait, the harder it is to remember the context behind transactions that don’t match. That $47 discrepancy from three months ago could take an hour to figure out when it would have taken two minutes if you’d caught it right away.

Some business owners ask about reconciling weekly. If you have very high transaction volume or you want tighter control over cash flow, weekly reviews of your bank feed in QuickBooks are fine. But formal reconciliation still happens monthly because that’s when your bank issues a statement with a confirmed ending balance to reconcile against.

The bottom line is that your financial reports are only as reliable as your last reconciliation. If you haven’t reconciled in three months, your profit and loss statement and balance sheet are not trustworthy. You’re making decisions based on numbers that might be wrong. Our Bronx bookkeeping services include monthly reconciliation for every account because it’s the foundation that everything else depends on. Without it, nothing else in your books can be trusted.