A reconciliation process in accounting consists in matching entries made in the various accounts; the objective is to identify unmatched entries for a possible future investigation (errors etc); this is specifically used on accounts receivable/payable between the debits and credits: for instance, an unmatched debit entry on a customer account may indicate that this customer is owing you that unmatched entry; the reverse for a supplier.

For "bank reconciliation", the objective is identical: identify the debits & credits as recorded by you into your company's accounting book which are not (yet) recorded by your bank(s) into their own book (your bank account statement) and symetrically identify debits or credits recorded by the bank and not (yet) by you. Such a bank reconciliation allows also to detect errors made by each of the parties.

OpenErp allows you to key in - entry by entry and manually - the payments you have made or the payment received; this is done with the bank journal and entries are posted to the corresponding bank accounts. As far as I understand how OpenErp works these entries must be limited to payments NOT already recorded by the automated processes - those customers' or suppliers' invoices with a > NON PAID STATUS

• or by the import of a file - each individual debit or credit the bank statement (that you first downloaded from your Bank system). When importing such a file - which by default contains every debits and credits recorded by the bank-, you will duplicate some entries into your system -the ones that have been already posted thru the automated process provided by OpenErp. To avoid such duplication either you delete potential duplicates BEFORE THE IMPORT OR BEFORE CLICKING ON CONFIRM (after the import)

Am I right saying this?

Here is the documentation: http://doc.openerp.com/v6.1/book/3/3_7/accounting_entries.html