Somewhere in last month's bank statement there is a deposit you cannot take apart. You know roughly what it was, a slip of rent checks from the first week, and you know it was right on the day you made it. What you no longer have is the list.
The bank does not keep the list. It was handed five checks from five people and it wrote down one number, because one number is all a bank needs. Your ledger went the other way: five payments, five residents, each recorded on the day it came in. Both records are accurate. They do not look alike, and month end is when you are asked to make them agree.
There is a fast way to do that, and you may have used it. You enter the deposit as one line of rent, total only, and the bank line has its match. Or you tie the deposit to the nearest payment and cover the difference with a note nobody will read. The reconciliation balances either way. The bank is satisfied, and the bank was never the party with a question.
The questions come from everyone else. When a resident says, months later, that they paid, the one document that could settle it is a deposit slip that went into a drawer, then a box. An owner asks why a unit shows a balance when the building's deposits look full. Your bookkeeper spends an afternoon proving that one deposit was the sum of five payments everybody already believed had been made.
None of this registers as an error. A lump sum reconciles perfectly, and that is what makes it expensive: the month closes clean with the one fact you will need later left out of it. The bill arrives months afterward, addressed to whoever happens to remember.
A deposit is a list of people. The bank kept only the total.
The list is the record, so keep it where the reconciliation is. Each payment goes into the books against the resident who made it, on the day it arrives, and stays that way. When the statement comes in, the deposit line is matched to those payments as a set: this one, this one, and these three. Their total proves the bank's figure, and nobody had to flatten five people into a number to get there.
What changes is what a reconciled month can answer. The resident's question stops being a search, because the deposit shows the payments inside it. A deposit that comes up one rent short says so on the day you match it, while the check is still in somebody's desk.
Scaalr's bank reconciliation takes several ledger entries on one statement line: drag each payment onto the deposit, the line carries the set beneath it, and the reconciliation cannot be marked complete until the cleared total agrees with the statement. Where bundled deposits come from, the differences that stop a set from adding up, and the eight-step procedure are in How to Reconcile One Deposit Covering Several Rent Payments.
For the complete guide to matching one deposit to the payments inside it, see: How to Reconcile One Deposit Covering Several Rent Payments.
The first 5 units are free, then $0.99 a unit a month, and bank reconciliation is on every plan.