My ledger balance doesn't match the bank — how do I do a proper bank reconciliation?

A proper bank reconciliation is more than comparing two numbers at month-end. Start by matching every transaction on the bank statement against every entry in the ledger, and flag anything present in one and missing from the other. The common, perfectly normal differences: cheques issued and booked in the ledger that haven't cleared the bank yet, collections that hit the bank account but haven't been recorded in the ledger yet, and bank charges or interest deducted that no one knew to book until the reconciliation caught them.

Any remaining difference after accounting for all of that needs to be traced item by item until it's explained — not parked as a reconciling difference in a suspense account. A disciplined monthly bank reconciliation catches recording errors, or even suspicious activity, early, before it builds into a large amount that's hard to trace back. RASEEKH treats the bank reconciliation as a core part of the monthly close, not an optional step.