Cash and bank: accounts, cheques and reconciliationالنقد والمصارف: الحسابات والشيكات والمطابقة

Cash/bank management holds six entries. They do three different jobs, and knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting:

The first is setup you do once. The middle three are day-to-day work. The last two are for looking things up.

A bank account is an account first. Before any of this is useful, the bank has to exist in your chart of accounts - see Banks and How to open a bank account. Bank setup does not create the account; it records the extra details that belong to the bank, not to the bookkeeping.

1. Bank setup - the details the ledger has nowhere to put

Your chart of accounts knows a bank account as a number and a balance. It has nowhere to keep the IBAN, the Swift code, the routing number, the account number the bank itself uses, or which branch you deal with. That is what this list is for: one row per bank account, linked to the ledger account by the Account column.

Fill it in once. Everything else in this group, and every cheque you print, reads from here.

2. Check deposit - banking a batch of cheques

This is the one you will use most. You have taken in several cheques; you are walking them to the bank as one deposit.

Choose the Bank name and the Account the money is going into, then list the cheques. Each line carries the cheque's own number, amount, value date and the bank it is drawn on, so the deposit slip and your books say the same thing.

Two things here are worth knowing before you need them:

• Vouchers Selection pulls in cheques you have already recorded on a receipt, instead of making you type them again. Filter by Reference, Payment kind, Bank value date or Bank reference.
• Charge handles the bank's fee, and it offers a real choice: Global charge in a separate transaction puts one fee against the whole deposit, while Charge per check payment transaction attaches a fee to each cheque. Pick the one that matches how your bank actually bills you, because it changes what your costs look like per customer.

Value date is not the date. Date is when you made the deposit; value date is when the bank will treat the money as available. On a post-dated cheque these are weeks apart, and it is the value date that decides when you can spend it.

3. Check transfer - moving cheques without banking them

A cheque sitting in one cash box needs to be in another - it is moving from the branch safe to head office, or from a salesperson's collection to the main box. Nothing is being paid or banked; the cheque is just changing hands.

Set the From cash box and the To cash box, list the cheques, and save. Global reference puts one reference on the whole transfer; Reference per check lets each cheque carry its own.

4. Bank reconciliation - the difference is the point

This is the screen that answers "why does the bank say I have a different amount than my books do?"

You give it your bank account and a date range. It shows your Account balance - what your books say - and you type in the Bank balance from the statement. Difference is the gap, and the whole job is to explain it away.

Work down the list and tick every entry that appears on the bank statement. What stays unticked is your answer: cheques you have written that nobody has cashed yet, deposits the bank has not credited yet. Total checked adds up what you have ticked as you go.

Two details make it usable on a long list. The upper grid is Non reconciled previous transactions - things left over from earlier periods that never cleared, which is exactly where an old unexplained difference hides. And Order by lets you sort by Voucher date, Value Date or Operation date; matching a bank statement is far easier by value date, because that is the order the bank used.

Reconciling changes nothing about your balance. Ticking an entry records that you have seen it on the statement. It does not move money, and it does not correct anything. If the difference will not close, the fix is a journal entry, not a tick.

5. Check search - finding one cheque

Someone rings up about a cheque. You have the number and nothing else. This searches every cheque in the company by Check number, Amount or Order of - the name it was made out to - and tells you which bank it is drawn on and in what currency.

6. Cash flow - deciding what counts as cash

Cash flow is not a report you simply run: it has to be told what "cash" means in your company first. The three tabs are the setup, in order.

• Setup cash account - which accounts are cash. In the example above the whole of Current Assets is included, at code 5.
• Setup activities - the headings you want the movement grouped under.
• Setup plan - what you expected, so the report can show planned against actual.

Then pick a date range and preview. Select report in the ribbon chooses the layout, exactly as it does on every other report in Libra.

7. Workflow setup - the workflow tiles

Workflow setup sits in the same group as Banks. It opens as a page of seven tiles, each of which opens one part of the workflow setup: Workflow templates, Workflow stages, Workflow actions, Checks workflow, Stages roles, Transaction template and User check numbers. A Workflow setup group of its own also appears further down the navbar.