The Payment Reconciliation Journal window specifies payments, either incoming or outgoing payments, that have been recorded as transactions on your online bank account and that you can apply to their related open customer, vendor, and bank account ledger entries. The lines in the journal are filled by importing bank statements as files or bank feeds.

A payment reconciliation journal is related to one bank account that reflects one or more electronic bank accounts where the payment transactions are recorded. Any open bank account ledger entries related to the applied customer or vendor ledger entries will be closed when you choose the Post Payments and Reconcile Bank Account action. This means that the bank account is automatically reconciled for payments that you post with the journal.

If you want to import bank statements as bank feeds, you must first enable the Bank Statement service and then link the bank account to one or more online bank accounts. The payment reconciliation journal will then automatically detect bank feeds when you choose the Import Bank Transactions action. In addition, you can set a bank account up to automatically import new bank statement feeds into the Payment Reconciliation Journal window every hour. Transactions for payments that have already been posted as applied and/or reconciled will not be imported. For more information, see How to: Link Bank Accounts to Online Bank Accounts.

With the Map Text to Account action, you can set up mappings between text on payments and specific debit, credit, and balancing accounts so that such payments are posted to the specified accounts when you post the payment reconciliation journal. See step 9. For more information, see How to: Map Text on Recurring Payments to Accounts for Automatic Reconciliation.

Similar functionality exists to reconcile excess amounts on payment reconciliation journal lines on an ad-hoc basis. For more information, see How to: Reconcile Payments That Cannot be Applied.

You use the Apply Automatically function, either automatically when you import a bank file with payment transactions or when you activate it, to apply payments to their related open entries based on data matches between bank transaction text and entry information.

On journal lines where a payment has been applied automatically to one or more open entries, the Match Confidence field has a value between Low and High to indicate the quality of the data matching that the suggested payment application is based on. In addition, the Account Type and Account No. fields are filled with information about the customer or vendor that the payment is applied to. If you have set up a text-to-account mapping, the automatic application can result in a match confidence value of High - Text-to-Account Mapping.

For detailed information and examples about the application rules that govern the automatic application, see How to: Set Up Rules for Automatic Application of Payments.

For each journal line in the Payment Reconciliation Journal window, you can open the Payment Application window to see all candidate open entries for the payment and view detailed information for each entry about the data matching that a payment application is based on. Here, you can manually apply payments or reapply payments that were applied automatically to a wrong entry. For more information, see How to: Review or Apply Payments After Automatic Application.

Note
You can start the bank transactions import at the same time as you open the Payment Reconciliation Journal window for an existing payment reconciliation journal in the Payment Reconciliation Journals window. The following procedure describes how to import bank transactions into the Payment Reconciliation Journal window after you have created a new journal.

To reconcile payments using automatic application

  1. In the Search box, enter Payment Reconciliation Journals, and then choose the related link.

  2. To work in a new payment reconciliation journal, on the Home tab, in the New group, choose New Journal.

  3. In the Payment Bank Account List window, select the bank account that you want to reconcile payments for, and then choose OK.

    The Payment Reconciliation Journal window opens prepared for the selected bank account.

  4. On the Home tab, in the Application group, choose Import Bank Transactions.

    If the bank account for the selected journal is not set up for importing bank transactions, then a dialog box will open to help you fill the relevant fields. For more information, see Bank Statement Import Format.

  5. In the Select a file to import window, select the file that contains the bank transactions for payments that you want to reconcile, and then choose Open.

  6. If the Bank Statement service is enabled, in the Bank Statement Filter window, specify the date interval for the bank statements to be imported as a bank feed.

  7. The Payment Reconciliation Journal window is filled with lines for payments representing bank transactions in the imported file.

    On lines for payments that have been automatically applied to their related open entries, the Match Confidence field has a value between Low and High to indicate the quality of the data matching that the suggested payment application is based on. In addition, the Account Type and Account No. fields are filled with information about the customer or vendor that the payment is applied to.

  8. Select a journal line, and then, on the Home tab, in the Application group, choose Apply Manually to review, reapply, or apply the payment manually in the Payment Application window. For more information, see How to: Review or Apply Payments After Automatic Application.

    When you have finished your manual application, the Match Confidence field on the journal line that you have processed manually contains Accepted.

  9. Select an unapplied journal line for a recurring cash receipt or expense, such as a car gasoline purchase, and then on the Home tab, in the Review group, choose Map Text to Account. For more information, see How to: Map Text on Recurring Payments to Accounts for Automatic Reconciliation.

  10. When you have finished your mapping of payment text to accounts, on the Home tab, in the Application group, choose Apply Manually.

  11. When you are content that all payments on the journal lines are correctly applied or set to direct posting, on the Home tab, in the Application group, choose Post.

When you post the payment reconciliation journal, the applied open entries memos are closed, and the related customer, vendor, or general ledger accounts are updated. For payments on journal lines based on text-to-account mapping, the specified customer, vendor, and general ledger accounts are updated. For all journal lines, bank account ledger entries are created. If you choose the Post Payments and Reconcile Bank Account action, any open bank account ledger entries related to the applied customer or vendor ledger entries will be closed. This means that the bank account is automatically reconciled for payments that you post with the journal.

You can compare the value in the Balance on Bank Account After Posting field together with the value in the Statement Ending Balance field to track when the bank account is reconciled based on payments that you post.

Note
If you do not want to reconcile the bank account from the Payment Reconciliation Journal window, then you must use the Bank Acc. Reconciliation window. For more information, see Reconcile Bank Accounts.

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