Your bank balance and your available funds are not the same figure. The difference is the cheques you have issued that have not yet been paid — and if you do not know what those are, the balance is misleading you.

The statuses that matter

ChequeMaster gives each cheque a status, colour-coded on the dashboard:

  • Issued — printed and handed over, not yet paid. The one that represents a live commitment.
  • Cleared — the bank has paid it. Done.
  • Missed — past its expected date without clearing. The list worth chasing.
  • Returned — bounced.
  • Cancelled — voided before payment.
  • Stopped Payment — you instructed the bank not to pay.

The habit that makes it work

None of this helps unless statuses are updated. A cheque left marked Issued for eight months is noise, and enough noise makes the whole record untrustworthy.

Once a month, with the bank statement:

  1. Pull the list of cheques still marked Issued.
  2. Mark anything that appears on the statement as Cleared.
  3. Look at what is left. Anything well past its date is worth a call — the payee may not have received it.
  4. Note anything approaching its three-month validity limit.

Fifteen minutes, and the outstanding figure becomes real.

What the uncleared list tells you

  • Your true available balance — statement balance minus uncleared cheques.
  • Cheques that never arrived. A cheque uncleared for two months often means the payee never got it. Better to discover that yourself than to receive the chaser.
  • Cheques about to go stale, so you can offer a replacement before it expires.
  • What is coming, if you include forward-dated post-dated cheques.

Reconciliation is a spreadsheet job

Matching a cheque list against a statement is easier in a spreadsheet than on screen, which is why the reports export to Excel. Export issued and cleared cheques for the period, put the statement beside it, and the exceptions stand out.

See reports and advanced search for the filters, and note that reports are a licensed feature rather than part of the free edition.

Why this beats a cheque book stub

Counterfoils give you a record only if someone fills them in, they cannot be searched, and they cannot be filtered by status or date. The practical difference is that "what have we got outstanding?" takes seconds instead of an afternoon — which is the difference between doing it monthly and not doing it.