Reconciliation

Reconciliation is where the bank's record and your books meet. Each imported statement line is evidence of money that moved; on the reconcile screen you decide what each line is — something already in your books, a payment against an invoice, a new transaction, or noise. When every line is cleared, books and bank agree to the cent.

The reconcile screen

Banking → Reconcile lists your staged statement lines as cards, filtered by account, by import, by a search box, and by status: Unmatched (still to review), Matched (linked or booked), and Excluded. A tally shows how many lines are left to review. Lines arrive here from bank imports.

Suggested matches

For every unmatched line on screen, PulseBooks looks for what it might be: an open invoice the amount would settle, or a transaction already recorded — including transactions written by invoice and bill payments. Candidates are scored, and strong matches are offered for one-click acceptance.

When several strong matches are on screen at once, Accept strong matches takes them all in one confirmed step; lines that cannot be accepted are left for you to handle individually. Find a different match… opens a picker when the suggestion is wrong or missing.

Matching a line

• Match to a transaction — links the line to a record already in your books. Nothing is booked; the line becomes the bank's confirmation that the transaction really happened. The matched transaction's type, amount, date, currency and account are locked while the match stands — see Income & expenses.
• Match to an invoice — records a payment against the invoice, exactly as if you had recorded it on the invoice page: the invoice's balance updates and the payment's transaction is tied to the line.

A foreign-currency line settled at a different rate from the one the record was booked at posts a realised exchange difference automatically — see Multi-currency.

Creating a transaction from a line

When a line is genuinely new money, book it directly from the card: pick a category and vendor and hit Create, or open the dialog for the full form — description, tax, and the Record as a transfer option for money moved between your own accounts.

Two safety nets apply:

• Duplicate guard — if your books already hold something that looks like this money (a hand-captured expense from the same receipt, say), the create is held and the likely duplicate is named. You can link to it instead, or insist and create anyway.
• Rules — categorisation rules run when lines are staged, so lines matching a rule arrive pre-categorised. Create rule from this… on any card writes a new rule prefilled from the line in front of you; it applies to lines you import from then on.

Exclude line sets a line aside as noise — it stays visible under the Excluded filter, marked "Not booked", and can be put back for review at any time.

Undoing a match

Undo on a resolved line returns it to unmatched. What happens to the transaction depends entirely on who created it:

• The transaction pre-dated the match — only the link is removed. The books still say the money moved; nothing is deleted.
• The line's own Create booked it — the transaction is deleted with the link, and its journal entry is reversed on its own date. It only existed as this line's bookkeeping, so it dies with it.
• The match recorded an invoice payment — the payment is reversed, which is the only correct way to remove it; the invoice's balance goes back up.

The two destructive cases are permanent, and a connected AI assistant working in your books is required to confirm before performing either — see Connect your AI assistant. Undoing is also refused when it would touch a closed period; see Period close.

The bank reconciliation report

Reports → Bank Reconciliation (Pro and Business plans) is the tie-out: one card per bank and cash account, each stating its own verdict in words. It compares the balance your ledger computes against the balance the imported statements state, shows the difference, and counts the unmatched lines and unreconciled transactions standing between the two. An account that cannot be checked — no statements yet, say — says so rather than showing an empty cell. See Reports.

Stale reconciliation detection

A transaction sitting in a bank or cash account that no statement line has confirmed after ten days is flagged as stale: the dashboard shows a standing summary (how many, how old, how much), and the income and expense lists badge the affected rows. The summary also points out gaps in statement coverage — stretches of an account's history no imported statement covers. It is a data-integrity alarm, not a report: two entries the bank has never confirmed are worth knowing about before they become a mystery at period close.