Quick Study 6-7 (15 minutes)
a. A bank reconciliation is a formal review process that requires the person to
precisely identify all transactions and events, and their amounts, that
b. A bank reconciliation has the potential to uncover several kinds of frauds
or errors that an online review is unlikely to reveal. Those include the
following:
• A company makes a deposit to its account but that deposit is incorrectly
added to another company’s account. A bank reconciliation would
immediately identify this bank error. However, an online review would
not identify this error as nothing would “jump out” as unusual; the only
potential way of uncovering this would be if the person doing the review
expected in the regular course of business; the only hope is that the
person doing the online review remembers all amounts written to all
payees or that the amount is especially huge so that it is obvious. A
bank reconciliation would readily identify this bank error.
• A company check writer incorrectly records a check to a regular vendor
for services provided at an amount larger than the bill received. A bank
reconciliation would identify this error as the check amount in the bank