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Fine-tune Your Monthly Accounting With AppFolio Bank Feed
Reconciling your bank accounts each month is a core accounting task — one that can be tedious, time-consuming, error-prone, and even more stressful if you manage a diverse portfolio. Bank reconciliation is the process of ensuring your accounting records accurately match the transactions within a selected period.
Maintaining precise financial records, identifying discrepancies or fraud, efficiently managing cash flow, and guaranteeing adherence to financial regulations are all crucial components of property management accounting. Additionally, it plays a significant role in the financial well-being and prosperity of your business. This is especially crucial if you’re a third-party property manager, as you’ll need to provide evidence that you’re handling your owner clients’ money appropriately.
Keep reading to discover the significance of bank reconciliations, common errors made during bank account reconciliation, and solutions to simplify and streamline this process.
Category: Accounting & Reporting
Last modified: Feb 5, 2024
By: Gina Carr
Common Pitfalls with Bank Reconciliations
You should reconcile your bank accounts monthly to remain in compliance with most local real estate regulations and accounting principles. An audit of your portfolio’s financial performance can happen anytime — and without organized financial records, the process can be quite disruptive.
A lack of rigor around bank reconciliations can quickly lead to a complicated mess of accounting errors that can have ripple effects. These problems are often caused by:
Solutions for Stress-Free Bank Reconciliations and Clean Books
Using generic systems such as QuickBooks or Excel to reconcile accounts outside of your property management software means you’re doing double data entry, which often leads to errors and inconsistencies that require a lot of time to resolve.
AppFolio has invested in solutions that can assist you in automating this task, resulting in enhanced accuracy, consistency, and frequency of your reconciliations. This means you'll spend less time on manual data entry and more time reviewing and authorizing the system's work.
AppFolio Bank Feed can retrieve and cross-reference your bank transactions to automatically clear them. It allows you to reconcile your bank accounts with ease and precision on a bi-monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.
Bank Feed retrieves bank transactions from your chosen source — syncing with your bank through an integration or manually uploading transaction files. Once Bank Feed successfully pulls in your bank transactions, it automatically matches and clears them with associated records in AppFolio, handling up to 80-90% automatically. For any bank transactions that Bank Feed can’t automatically match, AI will surface AppFolio records that are likely matches for the transaction, enabling you to easily review and finalize without having to sort through a full list. In turn, if you haven’t yet entered a record in AppFolio, as is often the case for auto-payments, you can create it directly from Bank Feed to match that transaction.
Provide Your Team With the Flexibility to Achieve More
Bank Feed was launched in late 2022, and since then, we’ve released a handful of improvements to help you get the job done faster and more accurately, including an enhanced user interface, better data transparency, and additional support for matching multiple transactions.
In 2023 alone, Bank Feed auto-matched more than 3 million transactions for users! With these time savings, we have enabled our customers to achieve more just by taking this menial, time-consuming task off their plate.
Take Advantage of the Latest Innovations in Your Business
If you’re an AppFolio customer, you can find this feature in the task bar on the “Bank Accounts” page. You can also check out this helpful article in the Help Center. If you’re not yet an AppFolio customer and would like to see how our one powerful platform can support your business as you grow, sign up for a free customized product demo.