Bank Reconciliation & Bank Feeds

Bank reconciliation answers one question: does the money the bank says moved agree with what the books say moved? In AWRA it lives at Accounting → Journal, under Bank Reconciliation in the accounting sidebar. The first screen lists each account you reconcile with its ledger balance, how many statement lines are still unmatched, and when it was last reconciled. Do not confuse it with Reconciliation in the same sidebar, which is the ledger’s own internal integrity check and has nothing to do with a bank statement. Bank reconciliation is on the Premium and Enterprise plans; working in it needs the permission to reconcile transactions, and adding a bank account needs the permission to manage accounts as well.

Press Add a bank account and give it a name, and optionally the bank and the last digits of the account number. The decision that matters is the ledger account: choose the one your payments already post to, usually Bank. Each ledger account can be linked to one bank account only, and leaving it empty makes AWRA create a new asset account for this bank. Then set Reconcile from to the first day of your first imported statement. Ledger entries before that date are taken as already reconciled, which is what you want for a business with years of history — leave it empty and every old entry counts as outstanding, so the first check shows a difference nobody can explain.

In practice: a Nairobi school has run its fees and supplier payments through AWRA since 2024, all posting to the Bank ledger account, and decides to start reconciling its Equity Bank account from 1 September 2026. The bursar adds the account, links it to the existing Bank ledger account rather than creating a new one, and sets Reconcile from to 1 September 2026. When she later checks the September statement, only entries from September onwards appear as receipts or payments not yet on a statement. Had she left the date empty, two years of already-banked fee receipts would have shown as outstanding against a statement that never contained them.

Open the account and use Import a statement. AWRA reads CSV, OFX (including QFX) and MT940 files up to 5 MB. OFX and MT940 carry their own structure and import straight away. A CSV does not, so the first CSV from an account stops at Which columns are which?. AWRA guesses from the header row and you confirm: the date column, which is required, plus description, reference and balance if the file has them; either one signed amount column or separate money-in and money-out columns; and the date format, or leave it on Work it out. The file waits for that mapping for an hour; after that, upload it again.

The mapping is remembered for that account, so the next CSV from the same bank imports in one step. If your bank changes its layout, Change CSV column mapping clears it and the next upload asks again. Duplicate protection is built in: a line already imported — from an earlier upload, an emailed statement or the M-Pesa feed — is skipped, so importing a statement that overlaps the last one does not double anything. That means you can safely import a full month even when you already loaded the first two weeks.

In practice: a Mombasa freight forwarder’s bank exports CSVs with columns Value Date, Narrative, Debit, Credit and Running Balance, dates written as 03/09/2026. On the first upload the accountant maps Value Date to the date, Narrative to the description, Credit to money in, Debit to money out and Running Balance to the balance, and leaves the date format on Work it out. 212 lines import. Mid-month she uploads a statement covering 1–15 September; at month end she uploads the full 1–30 September statement, and the 1–15 lines are skipped as already imported, so only the new 187 arrive. No mapping step this time — the account remembered it.

Two routes bring statement lines in without anyone uploading a file. The first is the M-Pesa feed. On the Bank Reconciliation screen, Connect M-Pesa — with an optional start date, today by default — brings the M-Pesa money AWRA itself moves into reconciliation automatically every 30 minutes: paybill and till collections in, supplier and payroll payouts out. It creates an M-Pesa account to reconcile against the M-Pesa ledger account those same payments post to. On that account’s page you can Check now, Pause or Resume. Money moved on the till outside AWRA is not in the feed; it reaches reconciliation when you upload Safaricom’s statement alongside, and overlapping lines are skipped.

The second is the statement inbox: a private email address for the account that reads your bank’s scheduled statement email — CSV, OFX or MT940 — when it arrives. This one needs inbound email switched on for the server by your administrator or AWRA support first; until then the account page explains that inbound email is not set up yet. Once it is on, Set up the statement inbox shows the address to give your bank, you can limit it to listed sender addresses or domains, and New address replaces the address if it leaks, with the old one stopping at once. A CSV statement by email uses the column mapping saved from your last upload, so do one manual CSV import from that bank first.

In practice: a chain of three pharmacies collects most sales by till and pays suppliers by M-Pesa B2C from AWRA. The finance lead connects M-Pesa from 1 October. Every half hour the collections and payouts AWRA recorded appear as statement lines on the M-Pesa account. One branch also took KES 46,300 on the till during a system outage, recorded nowhere; at month end she downloads Safaricom’s statement and uploads it, and only the lines the feed had not already brought in arrive — including the outage takings, which she then posts and matches. Her bank account is set up for the statement inbox too, because her administrator had inbound email switched on, and she restricted it to her bank’s sending domain after one manual CSV import.

Statement lines sit under Unmatched, Matched, Ignored and All. Money in is a debit to the bank’s ledger account and money out a credit, the same direction the statement uses. For each unmatched line AWRA suggests up to three unmatched ledger entries on that account with the same amount and direction, dated within ten days, best first — closer dates rank higher, and words shared between the statement narrative and the entry’s reference or description count in a suggestion’s favour. Press Match on the right one. A ledger entry can clear only one statement line. Match the obvious ones does, in one go, every line that has exactly one candidate entry that no other line is competing for, and leaves anything ambiguous for you.

Some lines are not in the books at all — a bank charge, interest, a standing order nobody recorded. For those, open Not in the books yet, choose the account the line belongs to, add a description, and Post & match: the entry is dated on the statement line’s date and matched at once. A line in a closed month is refused there; reopen the month, or post a manual journal in an open one. A line that should never reach the books — a transfer between two accounts you already recorded another way, for instance — can be ignored, and Restore brings it back. Unmatch undoes a match, but only until the line is part of a completed reconciliation.

In practice: a Kigali NGO imports 140 lines for September. Match the obvious ones clears 118 of them at once. Of the rest, a KES 25,000 receipt has two suggestions — two donors each paid exactly KES 25,000 that week — and the accountant picks the one whose reference shares the donor’s name with the narrative. Nine lines are monthly bank charges and ledger fees totalling KES 2,340; she posts and matches each to the bank charges expense account. Two lines are an internal transfer the team records on the receiving account; she ignores them. One payout of KES 61,000 has no suggestion because it was a payment-run bank line that nobody had confirmed yet; she asks the approver to confirm it on the run, and the entry then appears as a suggestion.

Under Reconcile, enter the statement date and the closing balance printed on the statement, and press Check. AWRA works out what the statement should say from the books: the balance in the books on that date, less receipts the books hold that are not yet on a statement, plus payments the books hold that are not yet on a statement. It shows that figure beside what the statement actually says, and the difference. The list of entries in the books not yet on a statement is under the check, which is where you look first when there is a difference — usually a payment recorded on a different date or account, or a bank charge still unposted.

When every statement line on or before that date is matched, posted or ignored and the difference is zero, press Complete reconciliation. Completing locks every line it cleared: those lines can no longer be matched, unmatched or ignored, so a closed statement cannot be quietly rearranged later. Each account reconciles forward only — a statement date on or before the last completed one is refused. Past reconciliations are listed under Reconciled statements, and each completion is recorded in the audit log, so an auditor can see who completed which statement and when.

In practice: the books show the bank at KES 1,280,000 on 30 September. Receipts not yet on a statement total KES 85,000 (cheques banked on the 30th) and payments not yet on a statement total KES 48,500 (two cheques the suppliers have not yet presented). The statement should therefore say 1,280,000 − 85,000 + 48,500 = KES 1,243,500. The statement says KES 1,242,650, a difference of KES 850. One unmatched line is a KES 850 ledger fee; the accountant posts and matches it to bank charges, the books fall to KES 1,279,150, the expected figure becomes KES 1,242,650, and the difference is zero. She completes the reconciliation, and from then on none of September’s cleared lines can be touched; October’s will reconcile forward from here.