What is reconciling an account and how do I do it?

Reconciling your account or transactions is the process of making sure that what you have entered into MoneyWell matches what your bank statement (or website) shows exactly. You do this by telling MoneyWell what your bank shows as the starting and ending amounts for a specific date range and then confirming the transactions recorded add up the correct amount. The basic steps are below:

1. Make sure your account has the correct starting balance transaction.
   
2. Click Reconcile in the bottom of the main window to show the Reconcile view.
   
3. If this is your first reconcile, use the starting transaction date as your "Starting Date" value and zero as your "Starting Balance."
   
4. Enter the "Ending Date" and "Ending Balance" from your bank statement or website (if this is a credit card or loan account, this amount will be negative).
   On the right, you'll see a "Statement balance" amount that is equal to the ending balance minus the starting balance. Your goal is to mark transactions as reconciled that will add up to this amount.
5. MoneyWell may offer you suggestions about what is wrong and show you a Fix button—most of the time, this is a good button to push (if it doesn't do what you want, use Edit > Undo)
   
6. If you see the "Difference" amount is not zero, then you have to check or uncheck transactions until it gets to zero.
   You can select multiple transactions and change all of them to reconciled using the "Status" pop-up in the Transaction Detail to the right.

As a shortcut, you can use the Space Bar on your keyboard to toggle the currently selected transaction(s) as reconciled or not.

Most of the time, a statement won't reconcile because you are missing a transaction or have a duplicate. Another common problem is a mistyped amount. Here's how to find these problems:

1. Scroll to the first transaction in the list and check the running balance column to make sure it matches your bank account balance on that date.
   
2. Continue down the list looking for a balance in MoneyWell that doesn't match your bank balance.
   
3. Fix any wrong or missing transactions in that date range and then see if MoneyWell shows your statement as reconciled.

When your statement is reconciled, you'll see a green checkmark on the statement line and a reconciled message at the bottom of the reconcile view.