How to balance your bank accounts in Farm Focus

Why balancing matters

When your transactions are fully coded and matched, your Farm Focus balance should align with your bank balance. If you use bank feeds, you should always be balanced, provided your coding is up to date and no transactions have been duplicated or deleted.

Farm Focus automatically reconciles your bank account balance daily on the Balancing screen. This helps you quickly identify any discrepancies.

NOTE: Always ensure your accounts are balanced before preparing a GST return.

Use Farm Assistant to resolve balancing errors

If you’re having trouble balancing, use Farm Assistant to help identify where the issues are. Farm Assistant will guide you to the transactions causing the errors and help you work through them step by step until your balancing is resolved.

The Balancing screen

The Balancing screen provides an overview of your financial position, including:

1. Balancing Tab

2. The financial year.

3. The bank account being balanced.

4. A green line indicating where your balance is correct.

5. The Balanced amount (displayed in black text).

6. The Farm Focus Balance (displayed in red if it does not match your bank balance).

7. The Bank Balance (displayed in red if it does not match your Farm Focus balance).

8. Coded transactions (transactions are uncoded if marked with a blue Uncoded token).

9. Manual vs. bank feed transactions (manual transactions are labelled Manual Entry, whereas bank feed transactions are labelled Bank Feed).

10. A menu (three vertical dots) to view or edit transactions

11. A drop-down arrow to expand monthly details.

Why your farm business may be unbalanced

Your farm business could be unbalanced due to:

• An incorrect opening balance.

• Uncoded transactions in the Needs Action tab of the Actuals screen.

• Duplicate transactions.

• Deleted transactions.

• Manual bank accounts requiring a closing balance entry.

1. Check the opening balance

1. Go to Settings > Bank Accounts.

2. Verify the opening balance against your bank statement.

3. If incorrect, re-enter the correct balance in the Opening Balance field.

2. Review uncoded transactions. Uncoded transactions are marked with a blue Uncoded token.

1. Click the three vertical dots next to the transaction.

2. Select View Transaction.

3. Code the transaction as required.

4. The Farm Focus Balance will update automatically.

3. Remove duplicate transactions

1. In the Balancing screen, locate the duplicate transaction.

2. Click the three vertical dots next to it.

3. Select Delete.

4. Restore deleted transactions

1. Navigate to the Deleted tab

2. Locate the deleted transaction.

3. Click the Restore Transaction icon

   

5. Enter a closing balance (for manual bank accounts)

For manual bank accounts where transactions are imported via CSV or QIF files:

1. Check your bank statement for the month's closing balance.

2. Enter this balance in the Bank Balance field.

Additional causes of unbalanced accounts

Journal entries

You may have created a transaction in Farm Focus that does not appear in your bank account, such as claiming GST for a business expense paid from a personal account. These are called journal entries. Journal entries should not affect your bank balance as they should net to $0.00.

Pending transactions in bank feeds

On rare occasions, pending transactions may not appear in your daily bank balance. This usually corrects itself the next day. If necessary, you can manually adjust the bank balance for that day. Use this feature with caution.

Rabobank All In One accounts combine everyday banking with loan facilities.

• The Bank Balance shown in the Balancing screen is a combined total, including loan facilities.

• NOTE: You can manually adjust the balance to exclude loan facilities.

• The Farm Focus Balance reflects only cash movement.

• For more details, visit the Rabobank website