Balance and Close a Bank Statement

Closing a period starts with agreeing each bank account against its statement. This guide covers the statement worksheet, what the difference figure means, and what locking and re-opening actually do.

Who can do this: Any staff member, property manager, or board member with reconcile permission for the property.

Work through the worksheet

Open the reconciliation for the account and period. The worksheet lists everything that could clear against the statement, from both sides: lines your bank reported, and entries in your books.

Deposits and withdrawals are shown with their direction, so a deposit and a withdrawal of the same size are never confused for one another.

Tick the rows that appear on your statement. The cleared balance updates as you go, and the difference is what is left between your statement's closing balance and what you have cleared.

One item counts once. A bank line matched to a journal entry is one cleared item, whichever side you tick it from, so the difference falls to zero when you have genuinely agreed the statement.

The counts on the match-status tabs above the worksheet now agree with the rows actually listed underneath them, including rows that only exist as a ledger entry with no bank line of their own.

When URBI is still working out a suggested match and it takes longer than usual, the panel now shows a plain "in progress" status and a Check again control that actually re-checks and updates once the suggestion is ready, instead of promising an update that never arrives.

A row you deliberately un-tick stays un-ticked

If you un-tick a row on purpose, later automatic matching will not silently tick it again. Your decision stands until you change it.

Locking the statement

When the difference is zero you can lock the statement. Locking records who agreed it and when.

Once locked, nothing rewrites it: the nightly automatic matcher skips lines on a locked statement rather than moving them underneath you.

A statement that reaches either fully reconciled or locked is now clearly marked as finished everywhere you see it, and opens read-only, so it is never mistaken for one still in progress. The next statement you start on this account now always opens with the correct beginning balance carried over from this one, whichever of those two finished states it is in.

Re-opening

Re-opening a locked statement puts it back in progress and removes the record of who closed it, because it is no longer closed.

Re-opening releases the entries this statement cleared. Entries that another statement cleared, and that is still locked, are left alone, so re-opening one month cannot disturb a month you have already agreed.

Re-opening requires a reason, which is now correctly recorded in your property's history along with the reopen. If reopening this statement would land it back inside an accounting period that has already been closed, the reopen is refused with an explanation instead of going through.

Closing the accounting period

A statement counts towards closing its accounting period as soon as it exists, and closing the period checks that each account's statement is locked.

If your books have no open accounting period covering the statement's closing date, URBI will tell you so when you try to create the reconciliation rather than letting you build a worksheet that could never close anything. Open the period first, then create the reconciliation.

If starting or finishing a reconciliation is refused for any reason, from a mismatched date to a period that is still waiting on something else, URBI now tells you the specific reason rather than a generic server error.