How to do Bank Reconciliation in SAP

Bank reconciliation in SAP can be done with the help of two kinds of bank statements: manual and electronic. If it is a manual statement, you need to enter the details into SAP manually, but if it is an electronic statement, you can just upload the statement to SAP. 

Before we dive into the steps, let’s back up and ensure you understand bank reconciliation.

Bank reconciliation is a term that describes the process of reconciliation between the account maintained by the bank and the account maintained by you. 

There may be some instances when these accounts may not tally. There are a few reasons why this may happen. When it does, the bank’s accountant is responsible for preparing a bank reconciliation statement and presenting it to the bank’s management to determine the discrepancies in the accounts. 

The Steps 

1. Creating a general ledger account for the bank reconciliation statement. 

This may include the following:

• Check wire transfer
• Check issued out or issuing a cheque to the vendor.
• Check received from the customers
• Check for another interim posting

The accounting entries for bank reconciliation in SAP are:

• For checking issued out, Vendor account debit to check issued out account
• The clearance of  check issued out account debit to a bank account

Both of these entries help in clearing the check-issued account. Similarly, the other accounts are removed after being entered while preparing the bank reconciliation statement. 

2. To configure the bank reconciliation statement, you have to make the global settings for the electronic bank statement, after which you can enter your chart. Then, you need to create the account symbol, as these will be assigned to the general ledger account for posting when you are preparing the bank reconciliation statement.  You need to create account symbols for different accounts, which include account, check issue, check received, bank charges, wire transfer, and other items. 

3. Creating keys for posting rules is done to name the different accounts for posting in the bank reconciliation statement. Then, you must define the posting rules for all the keys specified in the earlier steps. 

4. Define posting rules for the keys to the new entries, including credit posting key, debit posting key, account symbol, posting type, and document type. 

5. Create a transaction type only required for the electronic bank reconciliation statement, where you can enter the transaction type you want and save it. 

6. Assign external transactions type to the posting rules- this is also required only for the electronic bank reconciliation statement. You can enter your posting rule for the external transactions you created and save it here. 

7.  Assign account to transaction type- here, you must enter the key, transaction type, account, and company code. You may also require extra configuration for the manual bank reconciliation in SAP, for which you may need two different paths, including defining variants for the manual bank reconciliation statement creating and assigning the business transactions.