A Better Way to Manage Your Everyday Money - Book - Page 75
Balancing your checking account
Balancing your checking account is the monthly process of comparing the entries in your
transaction register with the transactions on a checking account statement from the bank or credit
union. Balancing your monthly checking account statement is how you:
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keep your transaction register in PerNetFlow in sync with the bank or credit union
find unexpected fees
identify fraud
avoid overdrafts
find errors made by either you or the bank
Doing this monthly task is strongly encouraged. Failing to balance a statement once a month
opens the possibility of occasional errors, fees, and omissions that can put your records in
PerNetFlow out of balance with your checking account. Using inaccurate amounts in your
financial planning could eventually result in overdrafts and other rejected withdrawals, as well as
weakening, if not destroying, your spending plan.
Balancing your checking account once a month takes a few minutes in PerNetFlow. Not
balancing could become very expensive, frustrating, and self-defeating.
Residual check register
When you begin using PerNetFlow, you may have
a leftover manual check register that you used
with your checking account. The items in your
residual check register that have not yet appeared
on a statement must be handled first when starting
to balance a statement in PerNetFlow.
After all the items in it have appeared on a statement, you can discard your residual check
register.
Balancing using a transaction file
Semi-automatic balancing of your monthly checking account statement is done in PerNetFlow
with a file of cleared transactions downloaded from your bank or credit union's website in a CSV
format. The first time that you use a downloaded transaction file you must first create a
transaction file map (discussed in Chapter 3) so that the file can be used in the program.
Banks and credit unions do not group transactions by statement the way that credit card
companies do. The filter for the download of transactions from your bank or credit union must,
therefore, have a start date that is well before the date of the statement to ensure that all needed
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