What is bank reconciliation (rapprochement bancaire)?

In practice, in France

Legitimate differences are few and always the same: a cheque issued but not yet cashed, a transfer in transit, bank charges deducted but not yet posted. Everything else is a data-entry error, a duplicate entry, or a transaction that should not have happened.

That is why the reconciliation statement is one of the documents that support the accounts at closing: it confirms that the cash balance shown on the balance sheet corresponds to real money. An unreconciled bank account makes the whole set of annual accounts questionable, however careful the rest of the work has been.

In Odoo

Odoo reconciles automatically when the amount and reference match, and suggests matches for the rest. Statements can be imported or pulled in through bank synchronisation.

The real work lies in what resists automatic matching: grouped receipts, partial payments, bank charges, exchange differences. It is the unreconciled volume, tracked week after week, that measures the health of the process.

Common mistakes

• Forcing a reconciliation to zero out a difference: the anomaly leaves the screen, not reality.
• Only reconciling at closing, once no one remembers the transactions.
• Treating bank charges as noise, when they explain a good share of small recurring differences.