Every Business Unit has arranged with their banks to send an electronic version of their bank statement each day. That file is sent in accordance with the standardized “BAI2” file format. The file is received by our “Axway” server and then immediately moved to each BU’s bank statement import folder on the server.

The bank statements just stay there until someone at the college (you?) explicitly imports that data into ctcLink. Each bank statement is given an ID number (“Statement ID”), which can be useful when doing searches.

So, now you have the bank’s story about what happened to your money: deposits and charges. Where is your story? Well, it’s been in ctcLink all along. There are several FIN modules that interact as sources for bank reconciliation. Predictably, they are A/R, A/P, P/R, and T&E. Because these sources of transactions come from the ctcLink system, we call these “system side” transactions. This is presented graphically as we get further into the reconciliation process.

Now, each college ‘reconciles’ transactions recorded by their bank with the financial transactions they know about. When there is agreement, the bank transaction(s) are ‘reconciled’ to the system transaction(s). This is done in a graphical way by using the Semi Manual Reconciliation page.

PeopleSoft displays bank statement transactions on the left side of the screen (thus, “bank side” transactions) and system transactions on the right side of the screen (thus, “system side" transactions). The reconciliation user matches up appropriate transactions to each other using check boxes, and then hits a Reconcile button to change the status of the transactions. Some reconciliation ‘events’ are easy: the amount and the reference ID (a check number) match exactly. Others are more interesting!

When you are comfortable with reconciling easy transactions, you can have PeopleSoft automatically do those easy transactions using the Process Bank Reconciliation process.

There are plenty of times that will occur when the bank says you got money that the FIN pillar didn’t know about (say, from Student Finance) or were charged money you didn’t put in (say, a bank fee). Generally, you should take that charge and insert it ‘upstream’ into the A/P system. However, not all transactions can be dealt with so easily. If you cannot do this upstream insertion, PeopleSoft does have a mechanism to make your comes-from-the-outside transaction work.

A transaction recorded by the bank but not recorded by the FIN system will need to be acknowledged and accounted for. Specifically, it needs accounting information attached to it.

Let’s say you have a campus food truck that does its own bookkeeping and just deposits its cash into your checking account. That cash transaction shows up on the bank statement but there is no information about it from any of the modules in the FIN pillar. You need to put that transaction on the system-side of the reconciliation system and attach accounting information to it so that your books balance.

You can manually enter such an External Transaction into the reconciliation system and attach the accounting information (ChartString) to that transaction. If that accounting information is routine enough, you can create an Accounting Template that contains the ChartString information and can then be applied to an External Transaction.

If that is not mind-numbingly abstractly complex enough, there is a further option to automate the creation of External Transactions with their Accounting Templates based on the “addenda” data that the bank sends with each bank statement transaction line. Gadzooks!

If you opt to create External Transactions, then the reconciliation process moves the reconciled transactions into a mini-accounting area where the transactions are put into another pool that are now “Accounting Entries.” These can be reviewed, modified, and re-status-ed. Once those Accounting Entries are “Final”-ized, they are automatically swept into the Treasury Journal and posted to G/L.