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Library Services Assistant Guide

Credit card Reconciliation Process

The purpose of the Credit Card reconciliation  process is to match the costs on the monthly bank statement with the invoices of the relevant purchases and show the accounts where the money has been used from by entering the relevant budget code.

The bank statement is sent by GM  usually on the 20th of each month and should be dealt within a week.

All transactions showing on the bank statement need to be reflected on the reconciliation form and these can be grouped together for coding purposes as long as this is made clear to Finance so they can reconcile between the 2. For each line on the reconciliation form we need to have  invoices / receipts that give a full description of all items purchased, the date the purchase was made and how the value of the transaction is made up. For items where a receipt that provides this information is not available Finance will not be able to carry out their full verifications.  In those cases they will require the approver to be made aware of this and specific approval to be given to process the transactions without them being fully verified.

For the process we need to have opened:

  • The Monthly Spend spread sheet;
  • The Monthly Bank Statement; 
  • The Reconciliation Form and
  • GM credit card receipts for the relevant month 
  1. Open the Blank Reconciliation form, download a copy and fill the fields with the name of the card holder (GM), the department and the date of the bank statement. Upload this document to the correct subfolder in the 'Completed Reconciliation Forms and Processed Invoices' Folder. Continue filling this in on Sharepoint, not on your computer.
  2. Write down all the transactions from the bank statement in the same order onto the Reconciliation form with the date of the payment and, short description of the purchase and the cost as it is stated on the bank statement.
  3. Find each purchase on the Master Financial Records spread sheet,  retrieve the budget code and the description of the purchased product and enter them on the Reconciliation form.
    • Most of the budget codes will be for books/journals (520-10), teaching materials (510-10) and stationery (640-10) while the location code will be mostly for the Learning Services (506-02).
  4. Go to the GM CC Purchase receipts folder and find the correct month.
  5. Look for all the receipts which have been paid within the period of time reflected on the bank statement (it usually covers the latter part of the previous month and the first half of the current month) Any invoices outside that period will not apply for the purpose of the reconciliation process and should be left in the Receipts folder. 
  6. Open the subfolder in the month you are working labelled Processed Individual Receipts.
  7. Move all the individual receipts which match the lines you've already recorded on the Reconciliation form into the "Processed Individual Receipts" subfolder.
  8. Some Amazon invoices are grouped together and appear as one transaction/payment on the bank statement. If you can't work out which invoices have been grouped together, you may need to look in the Amazon account to find this information out. If you navigate to the Transactions section of Amazon (Amazon Account and Lists - Your Orders - Your Account - Your Payments - Transactions (https://www.amazon.co.uk/cpe/yourpayments/transactions)) it will show you what invoices they've grouped together to make the charge which shows on the statement. You may need to download these individual invoices if they have not already been saved in the Receipts folder.
    • For lines on the reconciliation form which are made up of combined invoices (i.e. one's we've identified above). It is a good idea to put the invoice number of each individual invoice which makes up the combined charge into the description of the line, so that it is clear what invoices align to each line.
  9. You can now move the invoices for those combined costs into the 'Processed Individual Receipts' folder. 
  10. We now need to merge all of the receipts/invoices for this month into one PDF file.
    • Open Adobe Acrobat DC and find and open all of the Receipt/Invoice PDF files.
    • Click 'Combine Files' from the actions panel on the right hand side, and click 'Add Open Files'
    • Make sure all the files are selected and click 'Add files'
    • Now use the 'Organize Pages' action (again from the panel on the right hand side) to move all the invoices/receipts to be in the same order as they appear on the credit card statement. (You can click and drag to move the pages around). Make sure the invoices for combined charges are together in the right order.
    • Upload this file to the correct subfolder in the 'Completed Reconciliation Forms and Processed Invoices' Folder
  11. After the completion of that process and, in order to clear the current month's folder,  it is a good practice to move all the leftover invoices to the next month's folder ready for the next month reconciliation form. 
  12. Make sure the balance on the banks statement, on the reconciliation form and of the attached invoices is the same.
  13. Attach the PDF File of Combined receipts, the bank statement and the populated reconciliation form and send them in an email to GM for approval.
  14. Sit down and have a coffee, you've done a great job.