The CFO really needs to stress how important daily bank reconciliations are. The bookkeeper might react something like this: “Not that!! No!!! Why???”

The why is that no matter the economic integrity of the times, the business owner needs to be aware of his cash position daily, and in real time. The only way to do that is to do bank reconciliations every day. If cash is tight or you have full blown cash flow problems, you really can’t afford to find out that a customer’s check bounced 3 days after the fact when the bookkeeper gets the returned NSF check back in the mail. In three days time, you’ve probably already sent checks on that money and risk any number of important checks bouncing. What good is it to find out at the end of the month if an EFT out of your account or a debit card transaction hits more than once due to clerical error by a vendor or bank when you do the month end bank reconciliation? For that entire month, you thought you had money that you didn’t, and now the consequences are all on you. The discipline in implementing daily bank reconciliations needs to come from the part time CFO and cannot be allowed to waver.

Daily bank reconciliations should take less than 10 minutes a day with online access to your banking transactions, and those 10 extra minutes will bolster the confidence of the business owner when they’re paying their bills.

If it warms them up any to the idea, let your book keeper know that all these daily bank reconciliations will make the month end reconciliation a snap!

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