Not closing the books for last year has no bearing on the reconciliation module as I have gone back and completed two years of recons on more than one ocassion. 

Is this your first reconciliation on this account? If so, be sure you have picked up all of the outstanding entries as at the start date for the bank statement. You may even want to complete the recon by hand to hilight anything that might be missing in Simply.

If this is part of an ongoing reconciliation process then I would enter the ending balance as the same as the starting balance without any checkmarks and see if the account is showing any unresolved or discrepancies. If it is then this could be the problem. a change may have been made to an entry after it was reconciled in an earlier month. Look for something like this and check it off. Another might be to find if both sides of a correction are showing as checked. Sometimes one does not get checked off. After resolving both of these points then complete your clearing of all items as they appear on the bank statement. Don't forget to put the ending balance back in properly. Is there still an unresolved or discrepancy? then something did not get checked even though you clicked on it and thought it had been checked. This can happen too easily.

Hope this helps

Clyde

Clyde - thanks for all the good info. I am sure that I went over all the points you raise - several times maybe - and never got rid of the error. In fact, every time I closed and re-opened SA, it came up with different values in "unresolved" and "discrepancy" and I never got to the bottom of what was doing it.

I ended up by printing out the January to November recon details (162 pages), unreconciling the account and started again at January (it was not as painful as it seems, because just by "clearing" all entries, then unchecking the outstanding from the detail report, I systematiccally had zero errors), at which point the December reconciliation balanced perfectly.

Et voilà . . .  the only problem is I'll never know what went wrong. Again, many thanks.

Stormy

 Before you reset the reconciliation be sure to print off the last good reconciliation report in detail. This will give you the outstanding items which will be important when you reset.

Go to Company/Accounts/Bank Account to open the ledger for tha account you are reconciling. then go to the Reconciliation Tab. There is a ceck box on this tab that has to have the checkmark removed. This will cause you to loose all reconciliation information from the past which is why I suggested the report be printed first. Close the page and go back to the home screen. This insures that the change has taken. Now go back to the same spot and put the check mark back in place and follow the prompts to re-setup your reconciliation file starting with the first uncreconciled month.

Hope this helps

Clyde

 This is why it is wise to print a reconciliation report every time you complete a month for each account you reconcile. Yes, the steps outlined in my earlier post will remove all of the reconciliation information for the past, all three years of it.

I would start with the month you are having trouble with after you have set up and included all of the outstanding deposits and cheques from the month prior. It should work and you would be good to go into the future months.

Clyde

I am fairly certain that the phanton numbers are caused by the entry date of corrections - e.g. you make a GL entry to correct a typo. Normally, SA gives you a "correction" and an "adjustment" that you can display (or not) by checking the "do not show corrections" box on the Reconciliation screen. Both must obviously be "cleared" to balance the debit/credit in the reconciliation.

I believe that SA has a programmatical error when you use a date in the current year to correct the previous year (i.e your "session" date is January 2009 for finishing up 2008). It does not seem to matter whether you make the GL corrections dated 31 December, the "correction" and the "adjustment" are spread out over the year end, one in 2008, the other in 2009 and you cannot reconcile.

The "work-around" is to set your session date to 31 December for all year end operations, regardless of when you do them in the new year.

Stormy