Reconciling an Account

Overview

Reconciling compares your Principal Plan records against a bank or credit card statement to confirm that both sides agree. Principal Plan provides a cleared balance, clearing toggles, and ledger filters that together serve as the reconciliation workflow.

How It Works

When your bank statement arrives (paper or online), follow these steps:

1. Open the account ledger. Double-click the account in the Account List to open its ledger tab.

2. Filter to uncleared transactions. Use the view menu or filter toolbar to show only pending items. The View Pending option shows all uncleared transactions. More specific filters like View Pending Checks and View Pending Deposits can help you work through the statement section by section.

3. Mark each transaction. As you find each transaction on the statement, click the cleared column or select Toggle Cleared from the right-click menu. The transaction changes from blank (not cleared) to a * (pending).

4. Compare balances. The ledger footer shows the running cleared balance. Compare this against the ending balance on your statement. When they match, reconciliation is complete.

5. Investigate differences. If the balances do not match, look for transactions that appear on the statement but not in your ledger (missed entries), or transactions in your ledger that the bank has not yet processed (outstanding items).

Clearing States

Each transaction carries two independent clearing states -- one for the account and one for the envelope. During account reconciliation, only the account-side clearing state changes. The envelope-side clearing state is independent and can be used for separate envelope reconciliation if desired.

The three states are:

State	Indicator	Description
Not Cleared	(blank)	The transaction has not been verified against a statement.
Pending	*	You have marked the transaction during the current reconciliation session.
Cleared	X	The transaction has been confirmed and the file has been saved.

When you save the file, all pending transactions are promoted to cleared. Pending is only a working state for the current session, so you can see what you just marked separately from transactions cleared earlier.

The Cleared Balance

The cleared balance is the sum of all transactions that are not in the "not cleared" state. It appears in two places:

• The ledger footer -- Shows the running cleared balance when the ledger is in cleared balance mode.
• The account list -- The Cleared column shows the cleared balance for each account.

The cleared balance corresponds to what your bank knows about. Transactions you have entered but the bank has not yet processed (outstanding checks, pending deposits) are excluded from the cleared balance but included in the full balance.

Ledger Filters

Several built-in filters help during reconciliation:

Filter	Description
View Pending	Shows all transactions that are not yet cleared.
View Pending Checks	Shows uncleared transactions with a check code.
View Pending Deposits	Shows uncleared deposit transactions.
View Pending Non-Checks	Shows uncleared transactions that are not checks.

The custom filter dialog also provides a Filter by Cleared State option with choices for any state, cleared only, not cleared only, or not cleared and pending.

Amount Changes and Clearing

If you edit the amount of a transaction that has already been marked as pending or cleared, Principal Plan warns you and automatically resets the clearing state to not cleared. This also resets the clearing state on any related transfer or split records. This prevents the cleared balance from becoming inaccurate due to post-reconciliation edits.