Reconciliation is the discipline that keeps your books honest. You import a bank statement, match every line on it to a transaction in Vendly, and investigate any line that doesn't match. The output is two trustworthy numbers: Vendly's bank-account balance, and the actual bank balance — and they finally agree.

When to reconcile

• Monthly, at minimum. Sooner if the business deals with high transaction volume.
• Before closing the period — you can't lock a month with an unreconciled bank.
• Before any external report (loan application, bid for tender, audit).
• After any unusual event — large refund, supplier overcharge, suspected fraud.

How to reconcile

1. Pull the bank statement for the period from your bank — PDF and CSV both work.
2. Accounting → Reconciliation → New. Pick the bank account and upload the statement.
3. Vendly auto-matches obvious lines (same amount, same date, same reference). Most lines should match without manual input.
4. Walk through the unmatched lines. Each one is either: a transaction in Vendly that's missing the reference, a transaction in the bank that's not yet in Vendly, or a transaction in Vendly that's not on the bank.
5. Add the missing transactions (a supplier payment, a bank charge, an interest credit).
6. Investigate the ones in Vendly but not on the bank — often a payment that hasn't actually cleared yet.
7. When everything matches, close the reconciliation. Vendly records a snapshot of the reconciled balance.

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Open Reconciliation

Reconciliation

Common gotchas

• Bank charges — banks deduct charges silently. They appear on the statement but not in Vendly. Record them as expense entries each month.
• Mobile money settlement — M-Pesa Paybill payments arrive in your bank later than the customer paid you. Reconciling the Paybill float to your bank settlement keeps the M-Pesa control account clean.
• Foreign currency — a USD invoice paid two weeks later has an FX gain or loss. Don't force the match — record the FX delta as a separate line.
• Cheques in transit — issued by you but not yet cleared by the bank. They're a legitimate unmatched line until the bank processes them.
• Bank typos — your account number is wrong on a customer transfer and the bank suspended the credit. The amount is in 'unallocated' on the bank's side; chase the bank to release it.

M-Pesa reconciliation

M-Pesa is treated as a separate bank account in Vendly. Reconcile it monthly against your Paybill / Till statement the same way you reconcile a real bank account — incoming customer payments matched to invoices, settlement transfers matched to bank-side credits, fees recorded as expenses.