Bank Reconciliation Template You Can Copy, Plus How to Fill It In
Here is the template. Select the table below, copy it, paste it into Excel or Google Sheets, add the four formulas in the section after it, and you have a working reconciliation form. There is nothing to download and no email to hand over.
This page is the form and how to fill it. For what a reconciliation is and which side each item belongs on, see bank reconciliation. For a month worked end to end with real numbers, see the bank reconciliation example.
The bank reconciliation template
| Line | Amount | What goes here |
|---|---|---|
| Bank side | ||
| Balance per bank statement | $0.00 | The closing balance printed on the statement, unedited |
| Add: deposits in transit | $0.00 | Schedule A total |
| Less: outstanding checks and payments | $0.00 | Schedule B total, entered as a positive number |
| Add / (less): bank errors | $0.00 | Negative if the bank credited you in error |
| Adjusted bank balance | $0.00 | Statement + in transit − outstanding ± errors |
| Book side | ||
| Balance per general ledger | $0.00 | The cash account balance on the same closing date |
| Add: interest earned | $0.00 | Credited by the bank, not yet in your books |
| Add: direct deposits and credits not recorded | $0.00 | Customer ACH, refunds, rebates you did not enter |
| Less: bank service and account analysis fees | $0.00 | Positive number; the formula subtracts it |
| Less: merchant and payment processing fees | $0.00 | Positive number |
| Less: returned (NSF) items | $0.00 | Positive number |
| Less: automatic payments not recorded | $0.00 | Positive number |
| Add / (less): book errors | $0.00 | Positive if your books understated cash |
| Adjusted book balance | $0.00 | Ledger + credits − charges ± errors |
| Difference | $0.00 | Adjusted bank − adjusted book. Must be zero |
Above the table, write four identifying facts: account name and last four digits, the general ledger account number, the statement period, and the closing date. A sheet with no period on it is unusable six months later, and the period is where most failed reconciliations go wrong in the first place.
How do you fill in each row?
The rule that decides every row: if the bank does not know about it yet, it goes on the bank side. If your books do not know about it yet, it goes on the book side.
Balance per bank statement. Type the number off the statement. Not the balance your software shows for the connected feed, and not today's online balance. The statement is the document your software did not generate, which is the entire reason this exercise has value.
Deposits in transit. Money received, recorded and banked that has not posted yet, almost always dated in the last day or two of the period. List them on Schedule A and bring the total here.
Outstanding checks and payments. Checks written and recorded that the payee has not banked, plus any payment you have entered that the bank has not yet processed. Schedule B, total here, entered positive.
Bank errors. Rare and real: a deposit keyed wrong, another customer's item charged to you, a duplicate posting. Enter the correction the bank owes you, positive if they took money that was not theirs. These are the bank's to fix, so nothing is journaled, but do not let the line sit unresolved past one period.
Balance per general ledger. The cash account balance on the identical closing date, taken from the ledger and not from a report that might be filtered.
Interest earned, direct deposits and credits. Money that arrived without you knowing. Customer ACH payments are the common one, and they are frequently sitting unapplied against an invoice you are still chasing.
Fees, processing charges, NSF items, unrecorded automatic payments. Four lines rather than one, because they are four different problems. Merchant processing fees are the most commonly missed item on the sheet: card deposits arrive net, so a fee nobody enters is a real cost that never reaches your P&L.
Book errors. Anything entered wrong: a duplicate, a transposed amount, a payment entered twice by import and by hand. Positive if your books understated cash, negative if they overstated it.
Difference. Zero or it is not finished. Resist the plug entry to a suspense account, which hides exactly the errors this form exists to surface.
Schedule A: deposits in transit
| Date recorded | Reference | Amount | Date cleared bank |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0.00 | |||
| $0.00 | |||
| Total | $0.00 |
The last column is what makes this schedule worth keeping: every item should clear within a few business days. Federal Regulation CC, the rule implementing the Expedited Funds Availability Act, sets the schedules banks work to for making deposited funds available, so a deposit still sitting in transit two weeks later is not a timing item at all. It is a deposit that was recorded and never actually made.
Schedule B: outstanding checks and payments
| Check / ref no. | Date issued | Payee | Amount | Date cleared |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0.00 | ||||
| $0.00 | ||||
| Total | $0.00 |
Carry this schedule forward month to month and tick items off as they clear rather than rebuilding it each period. Two things then become visible that a single-month view hides.
First, anything outstanding for more than about six months is stale-dated: never received, voided without a ledger entry, or genuinely unclaimed. Unclaimed funds eventually become a state reporting obligation with dormancy periods that vary by state, and the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators is where to start.
Second, a check number that appears on neither the cleared list nor the outstanding list is a gap in the sequence, and that is one of the few cheap fraud signals a small business gets for free.
How do I build this in Excel or Google Sheets?
Paste the template with the header on row 1, line items in column A and amounts in column B. The rows then land exactly where these four formulas expect them:
| Cell | Formula |
|---|---|
| B7, adjusted bank balance | =B3+B4-B5+B6 |
| B17, adjusted book balance | =B9+B10+B11-B12-B13-B14-B15+B16 |
| B18, difference | =B7-B17 |
| Conditional format on B18 | Highlight red when <>0 |
Stated in plain English, so you can rebuild it anywhere:
- Adjusted bank balance = statement balance + deposits in transit − outstanding payments ± bank errors
- Adjusted book balance = ledger balance + credits you had not recorded − charges you had not recorded ± book errors
- Difference = adjusted bank − adjusted book, and it is zero or you are not done
Two habits worth the thirty seconds. Format column B as accounting so negatives show in parentheses and everything aligns on the decimal. And enter every "Less" row as a positive number, letting the formula do the subtracting, because mixed sign conventions inside one column is the single most common way a homemade reconciliation sheet produces a confident wrong answer.
Who signs it off?
Add three rows under the sheet. They are not bureaucracy.
| Name | Date | |
|---|---|---|
| Prepared by | ||
| Reviewed by | ||
| Statement attached | Yes / No |
Reconciliation is the primary detective control over cash in most small businesses, and one performed and self-approved by the same person is weaker than one reviewed. In a very small business the reviewer is realistically the owner, and ten minutes with the statement alongside the completed sheet is worth more than it sounds. You are not re-performing the work. You are asking about anything on the statement you do not recognize.
There is also a clock you do not control. Under UCC 4-406, a customer who fails to discover and report an unauthorized signature or an alteration within one year of the statement being made available loses the right to assert it against the bank, and deposit agreements routinely set a much shorter window. Business accounts generally sit outside the consumer error-resolution timetable in Regulation E § 1005.11, which is worth knowing before you assume a business account carries the same protections as a personal one. A dated, signed reconciliation is the evidence that you looked.
What do you file with the completed sheet?
Keep the sheet, the bank's own PDF statement, and the ledger detail you reconciled against, together, one folder per account per month. That set is what an accountant, lender or auditor will ask for, and reassembling it two years later is far more work than saving it now.
The IRS sets the expectation plainly. Publication 583 tells business owners to make the statement, the checkbook and the books agree, sets out a four-step process, and says to reconcile each month. The IRS recordkeeping guidance adds the retention side: keep records as long as they may be needed to prove income or deductions, and keep employment tax records at least four years.
How do you adapt it for other accounts?
Credit cards. Same form, opposite direction. The statement balance is a liability, so a charge you have not recorded increases what you owe rather than reducing cash. Relabel "deposits in transit" as pending charges and "outstanding checks" as payments you have made that have not posted. The discipline is identical and the accounts are reconciled just as often.
Merchant and payment processor accounts. These need a third leg. Gross sales, processor fees and the net deposit have to tie together, so reconcile the processor's own settlement report to the deposits that reached the bank, then reconcile the bank. Skipping the middle step is how a business ends up reporting net revenue and understating both sales and expenses.
Savings, loan and payroll clearing accounts. Every account with a statement gets its own sheet. "It barely moves" is why it takes five minutes, not a reason to skip it.
Trust and client-money accounts. Do not use this template. Law firms with IOLTA accounts, property managers holding deposits, escrow and title companies all need three-way reconciliation, where the bank balance, the book balance and the sum of every individual client ledger must all agree. Two out of three is a failure. Our law firm bookkeeping guide covers the rules.
What the template cannot do for you
A form gives you somewhere to put the answer. It does not find the items, and it does not stop you writing a number in a box to make the total work.
It also cannot tell you whether the ledger you are reconciling against is sensibly built. If merchant fees have nowhere obvious to go, or one "bank charges" account absorbs four unrelated things, the sheet gets harder to complete every month for reasons that have nothing to do with the sheet. Our chart of accounts guide covers laying that out, and the same structure that makes a reconciliation quick makes every report built on the ledger easier to read.
What to do next
Copy the template and fill it for your last closed month. If the difference is not zero, work the period boundaries first: statement dates and ledger dates must match exactly, and your opening balance must equal last month's closing adjusted balance.
If you would rather someone else owned this every month, it is standard bookkeeping work rather than a specialist engagement, and it does not need to be done in the room. Of the 11,715 firms in our directory that advertise bookkeeping, 1,718 say they work with clients remotely, out of 2,681 firms overall that describe themselves as remote. Start with virtual bookkeeping services if location does not matter to you. Ask whether every bank, card and merchant account is reconciled monthly inside the quoted fee, and ask to see a completed reconciliation sheet for a sample month. A firm that produces one without hesitating is telling you something useful.
Method
Firm counts come from the AccountingNearYou dataset as of 28 August 2026: 27,281 US accounting firms profiled from their own public websites, of which 11,715 advertise bookkeeping, 2,681 describe themselves as working remotely, and 1,718 do both. A firm is counted as offering a service or working remotely when it says so on the pages we crawled, so these are counts of what firms advertise rather than of everything they do.
The template is a general-purpose form, not a compliance document, and the row labels are conventional rather than prescribed. This is general information about a bookkeeping procedure and not accounting, legal or tax advice. Retention periods, unclaimed property dormancy periods and the terms of your own deposit agreement vary, so confirm those against IRS guidance, your state, and your bank rather than against this page.