I was on vacation recently. As a result, I had a very different slate of activities.
However, one thing that didn’t change was my habit of reconciling my accounts. In fact, in a way it was more important to reconcile accounts as the number of my transactions spiked as we were out and about. If I waited until after my vacation, the number of transactions to reconcile would have been enormous. If there had been some difficulty in reconciling, it would have been a mess going through all the transactions to find the problem.
So I kept up with my reconciling.
However, at one point, I could not get an account to reconcile against the bank information. As I was struggling to find the answer, it didn’t help as I remembered my 2023-11-30 column where I had written that reconciling becomes easier the more you keep at it. My words were sounding pretty hollow to me at this point.
The irony is that I had just reconciled this account the previous day, so it should have been easy to spot where the error was. That is, it had to be in the last day or two. But it wasn’t visible.
It then occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t in the last day or two. I once had a legitimate bank charge that showed up only after a week or so. So let’s check the last few weeks of transactions.
Since I am very used to spreadsheets — I have been using them since the early 80s — a spreadsheet was my tool of choice. First, I downloaded my bank information and opened it in a spreadsheet. Then, I used hledger to generate a csv file over the same time period.
I made sure that the number of transactions that the bank reported equaled the number from hledger. Next, it was a simple task of totaling the bank’s expenses and totaling the hledger expenses. This would let me see what the difference was. However there was no difference. That should have meant that there was no problem. But there was a problem. So what was happening?
While the two totals might be equal, hledger’s running total didn’t agree with what the bank statement said was the current total. And then I noticed that the amount of difference — between hledger’s running total and the bank statement total — was equal to a pending charge.
Let me explain a little. My bank statement shows both pending charges and actual charges to my account. When the bank tells me what the total is, it is only for the actual charges. Well, it should be for only the actual charges. However, the bank total included one of the pending charges. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
Not sure why my bank doesn’t have its act together in that regard, but at least I was able to solve the problem in terms of reconciling the account.
Interestingly, this problem happened two more times. It’s hard to believe that the bank would list a charge as pending but include it in the total of actual charges. But that’s what happened, and now I know that it’s something to watch for.