Bank reconciliation in Business Central
How bank reconciliation works in Business Central — bank feeds, statement imports, AI-assisted matching, and month-end reconciliation.
Bank reconciliation is the routine financial task that benefits most from Business Central's recent investment in automation and AI. What used to be a half-day spreadsheet exercise is now mostly a click-through.
The model. Each bank account in BC is represented by a bank account card with its own ledger entries (the bank account ledger), currency, and posting setup. Reconciliations match BC's posted bank ledger entries against the bank's statement to confirm both sides agree, surface differences, and create journal entries for items only the bank knows about (fees, interest, direct debits).
Importing the statement. Three patterns are common:
- Live bank feeds via partner connectors (Envestnet | Yodlee in North America, regional bank-feed services in Europe and Australia/NZ) refresh transactions daily without manual import.
- MT940 / camt.053 files uploaded into BC, the standard formats most European banks support.
- CSV files with a configurable mapping for banks that don't provide structured exports.
The Bank Account Reconciliation page. Imported statement lines appear alongside BC bank ledger entries. BC auto-matches by amount, document number, and date, marking matches as green. Unmatched lines are highlighted for manual review.
AI-assisted matching (Copilot). The Copilot for Bank Reconciliation learns from prior reconciliations to suggest matches on lines that don't auto-match cleanly — payments where the customer reference is slightly off, batched payments covering multiple invoices, payments early or late, foreign currency conversions. The user accepts, modifies, or rejects each suggestion; the engine improves over time.
Posting transfer entries. Lines on the bank statement that don't have a counterpart in BC (bank fees, interest, direct debits, undeposited cheques) can be posted directly from the reconciliation as journal entries to user-defined GL accounts, eliminating a separate journal step.
Closing the reconciliation. Once the difference is zero, the reconciliation is posted, marking the matched bank ledger entries as closed and writing a posted bank reconciliation record for audit.
Month-end. A reconciled bank account ledger is what ties bank account balances on the trial balance to actual bank statements. Reconciliation should be done at least monthly; in many businesses it's run daily.
Related guides
- Bank deposits and cash management in Business CentralHow Business Central handles physical bank deposits, cash receipts, and the day-to-day cash management beyond bank reconciliation.
- Account schedules and financial reports in Business CentralHow Business Central's account schedules and the newer Financial Reports feature work — and how to build P&L and balance sheet reports without leaving BC.
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- Budgets in Business CentralHow Business Central handles GL budgets — budget names, dimensions, Excel import, comparison to actuals, and the limits worth knowing.