Control account reconciliation
The Control Account Reconciliation compares each control account's balance in your ledger with the documents that account stands for. If your aged receivables report says customers owe you £12,400, your receivables control account should say the same. This report puts the two side by side and tells you when they disagree.
It is the check an accountant runs first, and it finds a kind of error nothing else can see.
Before you begin
- Sign in and select your organisation. The report is available on every plan.
- Figures are shown in your functional currency.
- The report only reads your data. Nothing on this page changes anything.
Open the report
Go to Reports and, under Financial, open Control Account Reconciliation.
There are no dates to choose. See Why there are no dates below.
What it checks
| Control | Compared with |
|---|---|
| Accounts receivable | the Aged receivables report's total |
| Accounts payable | the Aged payables report's total |
| Customer receipts on account | posted receipts, less what has been allocated, refunded or charged back |
| Supplier payments on account | posted supplier payments, less what has been allocated |
| VAT control | your finalised VAT returns' net, less what you have paid HMRC, plus what HMRC has repaid — and any VAT your opening balances brought onto it |
Each row shows the ledger figure, the documents figure and the difference between them. Every figure is presented so that an ordinary balance is a positive number, whichever side of the books the account normally sits on.
A banner at the top tells you the answer in one line, so you do not have to read every row to find out whether anything is wrong.
Why this finds what other reports cannot
Most accounting errors show up as a balance sheet that does not balance. This one does not.
When an entry is missing entirely, both of its sides are missing together — so the balance sheet still balances, the trial balance still balances, and every total agrees with every other total. The books look perfect. The only way to notice is to compare the ledger with something outside it, which is what this report does.
The two errors it was built for are real ones found in Sales Scribe itself: a supplier payment that was marked as reversed but whose reversal never reached the ledger, and an aged creditors report that quietly left out credit notes nobody had allocated yet. On the day it shipped it found a third — a voided invoice that went on being shown as money a customer owed.
When a row differs
A difference is shown, named, and left for you to explain. Nothing is corrected automatically, because a reconciliation that fixes itself tells you nothing.
The row turns red and offers a link to the report behind it. From there:
- Accounts receivable or payable — look for a document that has been voided, cancelled or credited but is still showing as outstanding, or one that is outstanding but missing from the report.
- Money on account — look for a payment that was refunded, reversed or undone. Unallocated items lists everything still sitting on account.
- VAT control — look for a payment to HMRC, or a repayment from HMRC, that was voided or recorded twice, or a VAT return that was reverted.
If you cannot account for a difference, send this report and the one behind it to your accountant or to support. The figures on it are exactly what the export contains.
Each invoice, each payment, and each posting
Below the controls, three more checks look at records one by one, because a total can agree while two of the records inside it are wrong in opposite directions.
- Invoices whose balance due disagrees with the ledger. What each issued invoice says is still due — the amount a payment link charges and a reminder quotes — against what its own lines in the ledger say, in the invoice's currency.
- Payments whose status disagrees with the ledger. What each customer and supplier payment's status says its accounting entries hold, against what they do hold. A posted payment should have its receipt in the ledger with nothing reversing it; a refunded one, its receipt and a posted reversal (or, for a payment taken online, refunds and lost chargebacks that account for all of it, counted in the currency the customer paid in); one reversed as an error, its receipt reversed by a posted reversal; a draft or voided one, nothing at all. This is the check that would have caught the supplier payment marked as reversed whose reversal never reached the ledger. Anything that fits no status is shown as a shape no status has, with the reason, rather than guessed at.
- Postings that name the wrong document. Every accounting entry records the document it came from and, where there is one, the document it settles or corrects — and some of its lines record a document too. Each is looked up: that it exists, that it is the kind of document the entry says, that it is yours, and, where the entry gives the document's reference, that it is that very record. The database cannot enforce this for itself, because one entry can point at any of a dozen kinds of document. Anything that follows an entry to its document — a statement, a drill-down, the aged reports, which are built from these entries — would follow it to the wrong place, or nowhere.
When a list is empty, the report says so — for payments, with how many it compared. As with the controls, nothing is corrected automatically.
Why there are no dates
This report always answers for today, and the date it was run on is shown under the title.
What your documents say about who owes what is kept up to date rather than kept as history. A refund taken in January changes what your records say about last December, and there is no way to wind that back. If the report let you pick a past date, it would compare a ledger frozen at that date with documents that are not frozen at all, and it would report a difference for every payment settled since. That is a report that cries wolf, which is worse than no report.
Future-dated documents are included on both sides for the same reason: an invoice dated next month is already in your documents, so leaving it out of the ledger side would show it as missing.
VAT
The VAT control account moves only in three ways:
- Finalising a VAT return moves the return's VAT onto it — owed to HMRC, or, when you reclaimed more than you charged, owed to you.
- Paying HMRC, or recording HMRC's repayment, against a finalised return clears it.
- Your opening balances, if you moved to Sales Scribe owing VAT for a return filed from your old records.
So its balance should always be what your finalised returns say, less what you have paid, plus what you have been repaid — plus anything your opening balances brought onto it. That is what this row compares. Nothing else can post to VAT control: spend money, receive money and journals refuse it.
The VAT you charge and reclaim day to day sits on your output and input VAT accounts until a return is finalised, so a business that has not finalised a return yet shows nil against nil here.
Export
Select CSV to download the same rows the page shows, including the result of each one.
Before your opening balances
If your records on Sales Scribe have not begun yet, the report says so instead of showing rows of nil differences — because a reconciliation of nothing against nothing reconciles, and that would read as a clean set of books rather than as an empty one.