Learn about Bank Account Reconciliations

Learn about departmental bank account reconciliation requirements at Columbia University. 

Details

Bank account reconciliations must be prepared monthly by the person responsible for reconciling the bank account and approved monthly by the appropriate business officer. There are two types of reconciliations:

  1. Reconciliation of the bank statement’s ending balance to the ARC balance. 

  2. Reconciliation of the Master Clearing Account (MCA) that is associated with the bank account to the record of expenses or revenues that have not yet been posted to ARC.

There should be segregation of duties between the person(s) preparing/reviewing the bank reconciliation(s) and the person(s) recording or processing transactions.

The completed bank reconciliations must be submitted monthly to the appropriate central business office (Controller’s Office for non-CUIMC accounts and the CUIMC Administration Office for CUIMC accounts) for review within the required deadlines (see below).

All domestic bank reconciliations should be submitted to the appropriate central business office by:

  • Domestic - 20th following the next month of the reconciliation (e.g., January 31st is due February 20th).
  • International - 15th following the 2nd month of the reconciliation (e.g., January 31st is due March 15th).

The "Bank Reconciliation Report" (found within the Financial Data Store), which can be run on a single bank account for a single accounting period, provides the following information:

  • The beginning account balance
  • A record of transactions
  • Ending account balance with all currencies includes
  • Any differences between the calculated and the ledger variance.  Please note that if the variance is anything other than 0, it should be investigated.

This report should be used as supporting documentation for the bank reconciliation submitted to the Controller's Office each month. A PDF of the Bank Reconciliation Report must be supplied, not a copy of the Excel export.

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