Cash reconciliation
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How to automate cash reconciliations
Netting out changes in your bank account cash balance with GL transactions is no easy task for a single account. When you're working across dozens or even hundreds of bank and GL accounts, the process quickly becomes a full-time job — plagued by frustrating discrepancies, timing differences, manual errors, and missing entries.
Parabola automates cash reconciliations by parsing PDF bank statements and building a structured database across accounts, providing full visibility into cash position changes over time. From there, you can automatically pull in all of the associated GL transactions for your financial management system or ERP before rolling transactions up and netting out totals. Beyond time savings, teams that have automated this process in Parabola are catching discrepancies in a fraction of the time, closing the books faster, and providing auditors with a fully-documented end-to-end process.
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Why Parabola
In a world where efficiency is a key contributor to effectiveness, Parabola provides an unlock for businesses of all sizes in synthesizing large volumes of information into key insights."
Cash balance reconciliation is the process of ensuring that the change in a bank account’s cash balance over a given period matches the net activity recorded in the general ledger (GL). This process ensures financial accuracy and provides confidence in financial reporting.
- Import starting and ending bank account balances using steps like Pull from CSV file, Pull from PDF file, or Pull from inbound email.
- Import GL activity for the same period, ensuring key fields like transaction amounts and dates are included using similar steps.
- Calculate the net change in bank account balances using the Add math column and Sum by group steps.
- Aggregate GL transactions for the period using the Sum by group step to calculate the total net activity.
- Reconcile the bank balance change with the GL totals by combining datasets using the Combine tables step, matching on relevant identifiers.
- Flag discrepancies for review using the Filter rows or Add if/else column steps to identify mismatches or missing transactions.
- Export the reconciliation report to a spreadsheet or accounting system using steps like Send to Google Sheets, Generate CSV file, or Email a file attachment.
- Ensure all bank and GL data sources use the same time periods and include consistent identifiers.
- Use Standardize with AI to align field formats across datasets for seamless joins and calculations.
- Leverage Filter Rows to exclude non-cash GL accounts or irrelevant transactions to focus on cash-specific activity.
- To start building your cash reconciliation Flow, check out Parabola University.
