Many small business owners want to know their company's cash position, as of 5-minutes from now.  Interim reconciliation is easy in QuickBooks if you have access to your banking information online.  Just use the current day's balance per your bank, check off the recently cleared transactions, and select [Leave] once the difference is $0.00.  Your bank register balance can be trusted, and you can feel comfortable knowing that nothing unexpected is happening to your bank account. 

Sometimes, you want to know exactly why the online bank balance is different from that of your QuickBooks bank register balance.  Those who are 'check-register savvy' know that the exact difference is the total of all transactions that have been recorded in your register, but have not yet reached a bank teller.  Wouldn't it be nice to have a report that lists only those transactions?

QuickBooks may not have this report in its list of templates, but you can easily make one.  I prefer to take the General Ledger report, and customize it to filter only bank accounts and transactions that have not cleared.  A few more aesthetic manipulations and you have it.  If you perform such aforementioned interim reconciliations, you are still left with transactions you have checked off, but they are conveniently identifiable by an asterisk in the "Clr" column.  If you export this report to an Excel spreadsheet, you can sort by that "Clr" column to quickly remove all those.  Re-sort, and you have a nice list of only those transactions that make up the exact difference between your register and your online bank balances.

If you need more specific instructions, or your version of QuickBooks doesn't follow my workflow, sign up in our Virtual Office and one of our ProAdvisors can provide one-on-one assistance!