The bank register - Pacten Guides
The bank register is what actually hit your bank accounts, as opposed to what customers were supposed to pay. Under Finance → Bank register.
ACCOUNTS AND DEPOSITS
Two steps
Add the account once, then log what arrives.
1
Add your bank accounts
Each account you actually bank into. Deposits belong to one of them, so this comes first.
2
Log a deposit
The amount, the date, the account it went into, and a note. This is a record of money arriving in the bank, not of a customer settling an invoice.
CATEGORISING
Saying what it was for
The step that is easy to postpone and expensive to skip.
A logged deposit is immediately in your books — it is posted against the bank account straight away, with the other side held in a suspense account until you say what it was for. Categorising it moves that other side to where it really belongs.
Watch out
An uncategorised deposit is NOT sitting outside your accounts waiting to be dealt with. It is already posted, with the other half parked in suspense — so a suspense balance is not a queue, it is an unanswered question that is currently in your figures.
The screen shows how much is uncategorised, how many deposits it covers, and how old the oldest one is, precisely because that number quietly grows.
RECONCILING
Matching the register to the statement
The check that catches what nothing else does.
Reconciling compares what you have recorded against what the bank says happened. It is what finds the payment that was recorded twice, the one that never arrived, and the bank charge nobody knew about.
Tip
Reconcile on a rhythm rather than when something looks wrong. A month reconciled the following week takes minutes; six months reconciled in a panic takes days, because by then nobody remembers what any of it was.
Where it all lands
The journal, the trial balance, and what posts automatically.