Any company, in the development of its activity, has to be in permanent communication with its banking entities. Payment to suppliers through transfers, direct debits, checks, confirming… there are many day-to-day financial operations and services.
At the accounting level, all this information must be conveniently reflected and updated. However, sometimes, banking communication is not as agile as one might expect, so the confirmation of some operations (such as the payment of an invoice) is postponed or not confirmed, which ends up generating discrepancies.
To avoid all these problems, there is an accounting book called the bank book, which allows a company’s financial information to always be correctly reconciled, especially in everything that has to do with communication with banks.
Is the subsidiary bank book mandatory?
The bank book is not required by law, but it is recommended that any company, regardless of its size, keep it appropriately.
In fact, when kept through auxiliary (or transitory) accounts, it does not even appear in the balance sheet of a given company, so the Law does not require it to appear in the accounting books.
Causes why the bank book and real balance do not match
There are several reasons why the bank book balance and the actual bank account balance may not match. Some of them are:
- Human error when making the accounting record.
- Failures in the transmission of banking information.
- Differences between the registration dates and the valuation dates of the operations.
- Checks pending collection or payment.
- Expenses applied directly to the bank, such as some commissions.
How to make a subsidiary bank book?
To make a bank book, you need to follow the following steps :
- Identify all the company’s bank accounts and their corresponding movements.
- Record the movements in the bank book, detailing the date, amount, description and the affected accounting account.
- Perform bank reconciliation, comparing the movements in the bank book with the bank statements.
- Detect and correct discrepancies between both records, making the corresponding accounting notes.