Overview
Reconciliation is the process of making your DoorLoop accounting consistent with the balance reported on a bank statement from your financial institution. Any difference between the two needs to be examined and fixed.
Bank Transactions on the other hand is when you connect your bank accounts in DoorLoop to your actual financial institution to download transactions. This does not reconcile your account in DoorLoop. Instead, this connection is meant to import your transaction data so you can match these real-world bank transactions to your transactions in DoorLoop.
Note: Importing transactions with Plaid is not available to Starter Plans. Consider upgrading to the Pro or Premium Plans to access this feature.
If importing transactions doesn't reconcile for me, what does it do?
Importing transactions from your bank imports real-world account transaction data from your financial institution into DoorLoop to speed up the bank reconciliation process.
When you match DoorLoop transactions to these bank account transactions on the Bank Transaction page, these DoorLoop transactions will be auto-selected when you perform a Reconciliation. (They will also have a "C" in the Cleared column.) They are essentially "pre-approved" because they were already matched, and you verified the match.
This auto-selecting will save you some time, but in't necessary to complete the process. You can still compare the DoorLoop transactions to your financial statement and reconcile them yourself.
On my account register report, how do I tell the difference between reconciled transactions and those cleared via Plaid?
You can tell the difference between reconciled and cleared transactions by viewing your account register report. You'll see a "C" in the Cleared column for all transactions matched via Plaid and an "R" in the Reconciled column for transactions that have been reconciled.
Tip: To view account register reports, navigate to Accounting > Transactions and click on the bank account name you'd like to view, or click on the 3-dots icon and choose View Register.
What if I can't connect to my bank via Plaid to match transactions?
If you can't connect to Plaid, this is okay. Plaid doesn't work for everybody. You don't need to match transactions imported via Plaid to perform actual bank reconciliation.
Instead, you'll compare your real-world financial statement with DoorLoop transaction data during the Reconciliation process, clicking the checkboxes for the DoorLoop transactions as you reconcile them with your statement.