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The financial year ended on 30 June, and right now, all over Australia, business owners and bookkeepers are doing the same thing: getting their books in order so last year’s tax can be lodged. And at the heart of that entire process sits one task — the bank reconciliation.
If you can reconcile a bank account confidently, you can walk into almost any accounts role and be useful from day one.
If you can’t perform a bank reconciliation, tax time is when it shows.
What a Bank Reconciliation Actually Does
A bank reconciliation “matches” the transactions entered into your accounting software with the real transactions recorded in your bank account and credit cards. That’s it. Simple in theory — but the whole point is that your software should be a perfect mirror of what actually happened with the business’s money.
When the two match,
- your Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet reports can be trusted,
- your GST figures are right, and
- your accountant can prepare the tax return without sending you a long list of questions.
When they don’t match, every report built on that data is potentially wrong — and that’s a problem when the ATO is involved.
Whether your workplace uses MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks Online, the principles are identical, and our bank reconciliation courses cover all of them.
Important Things to Consider Now That Last Year’s Taxes Are Due
With the 2025–26 financial year closed, here’s what to pay attention to as you reconcile for tax:
Reconcile right up to 30 June — every account. Not just the main operating account. Credit cards, PayPal, loan accounts and savings accounts all need to be reconciled to the year-end date. An unreconciled credit card is one of the most common reasons a tax return gets held up.
Chase down the source documents. The reconciliation stage is where strict accountants and bookkeepers will demand evidence of purchases in the form of receipts or tax invoices. If you claimed an expense, you need to be able to prove it. Missing documentation for a big deduction is exactly the kind of thing that attracts ATO attention.
Check your GST coding before the figures go anywhere. Transactions without 10% GST — bank fees, interest, overseas subscriptions, insurance with stamp duty components — are the classic traps. If they’ve been coded wrong during the year, your BAS lodgements and your annual figures won’t line up.
Look for duplicates and omissions. Direct debits that come out automatically, interest charges, merchant fees — these often never go through daily data entry and only surface at reconciliation. Equally common are duplicated invoices or payments entered twice. Both distort your taxable income.
Get the one-off transactions right. Money the owner lent the business, a vehicle purchase that needs to be depreciated rather than expensed, ad hoc wages the owner paid themselves — these journal-entry-style transactions trip up more people than the everyday invoicing ever does, and they have real tax consequences if coded incorrectly.
Don’t leave a “suspense” account full of mysteries. Every uncoded transaction sitting in a holding account is a question your accountant will bill you to answer. Resolve them now while the year is fresh in your memory.
The Skill Employers Are Looking For Right Now
Here’s the career angle. July, August and September are catch-up season.
Businesses that fell behind during the year suddenly need what the industry calls rescue bookkeeping or catch-up work — someone to enter months of transactions and reconcile everything so the tax return can be done.
See MYOB & Xero Courses in Daily Transactions
Bookkeepers with strong reconciliation skills are in serious demand at exactly this time of year.
And this is one area where AI hasn’t replaced the human.
Modern bank feeds in Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks will suggest matches and even predict account codes — but when a reconciliation doesn’t balance, it takes a trained person to work out whether the problem is a duplicate, an omission, a transposed figure or a coding error.
Software can flag the discrepancy; it can’t take responsibility for fixing it.
That’s precisely why our courses make you perform a bank reconciliation that doesn’t balance, then track down and correct the errors. It’s the most realistic training exercise we offer, because it’s what actually happens in real businesses.
Where to Learn It
Our bank reconciliation courses take you through typical monthly reconciliations using Australia’s leading accounting programs — MYOB AccountRight, MYOB Business, Xero and QuickBooks Online — using case studies based on real business scenarios.
If you master this one skill before the tax-time rush is over, you’ll have picked the perfect moment. The businesses scrambling to lodge last year’s return need exactly what you’ll know how to do.
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