Blog
Reconciliation and close, explained
Step-by-step guides and honest comparisons for anyone reconciling bank accounts, closing the books, or building an AI bookkeeping workflow.
· 8 min read
8 Common Bank Reconciliation Mistakes, and How to Fix Each One
The eight most common reasons a bank reconciliation never quite balances, from a bad beginning balance to a backward credit card sign convention, with the specific fix for each.
· 7 min read
Credit Card Reconciliation and the Sign Convention That Trips Everyone Up
Credit card statements list charges as positive and payments as negative; many ledgers record it the opposite way. A worked example of the invert-amounts fix, plus what still needs real investigation.
· 8 min read
The Month-End Close Checklist: All 20 Tasks Explained
A full twenty-task month-end close checklist across cash, revenue, expenses, payroll, assets and reporting, with the reasoning behind every task and a link to generate your own.
· 8 min read
BlackLine Alternatives for Small Business (An Honest Comparison)
BlackLine is enterprise close software. Here are the realistic alternatives for a small business or solo bookkeeper: spreadsheets, FloQast, your accounting software, and Ledgerler, and when each actually fits.
· 8 min read
AI Bookkeeping and Reconciliation: Why Matching Still Needs a Deterministic Engine
The 2026 wave of AI bookkeeping agents is good at judgment calls and bad at exhaustive comparison. Why reconciliation should be a tool call, not a model guess, and how an agent should use one.
· 8 min read
The Types of Account Reconciliation: Bank, Credit Card, Balance Sheet, Intercompany, Payroll
A field guide to the different kinds of account reconciliation a business needs beyond the bank account, and the common discipline that ties them all together.
· 7 min read
Bank Reconciliation in Xero: Find & Match, and Where It Breaks
How Xero's continuous Find & Match reconciliation model works, the Xero-specific problems (feed gaps, stale bank rules, FX variance), and a periodic sanity check worth running anyway.
· 7 min read
Bank Reconciliation in QuickBooks Online: Workflow and Common Problems
How the QuickBooks Online Reconcile tool works, plus the four most common reasons a QBO reconciliation will not balance and how to fix each one.
· 8 min read
The Month-End Close Process, and the Order It Actually Has to Happen In
What month-end close is, why the steps have to happen in a specific order, and what a lean but complete close looks like for a small business.
· 7 min read
How to Do a Bank Reconciliation, Step by Step
A practical walkthrough of bank reconciliation: matching transactions, separating timing differences from real errors, and a full worked example with numbers that tie out.