Synchronizing your bank with an ERP involves dumping bank transactions into the system to be able to manage your accounting in an integrated way. In this way, we can record payments and receipts, reconcile invoices and have full visibility of the current situation.
What are the advantages of bank synchronization?
By synchronizing the bank account with the system, it is possible to have a global vision of the accounting. This will favor both the integration of the different areas of the business and the efficiency of the processes.
For example, if you currently manage your accounting with excel, you have to write line by line every movement, journal entries... However, Odoo automates these processes. By dumping the transactions, Odoo will collect the accounting entries in a single line and they will be linked to the corresponding transaction.
In addition to saving time and complexity in terms of day-to-day processes, having everything integrated in the accounting module will automate other more costly procedures, such as the generation of reports.
Odoo collects the data to display them both in the dashboard module, where we can see a global summary of the business, and in the accounting reports. All the information added to the system will create our balance sheets, profit and loss accounts, tax reports, general ledger, etc.
How does the synchronization work in Odoo?
When starting the bank synchronization in our database, the first thing to do is to have an Odoo Enterprise subscription, as the connection of a bank will not work during the trial period.
To perform the synchronization in Spain, Odoo connects with three entities, which act as intermediaries between Odoo and the banks. These are Salt Edge, Enable Banking and Ponto, the first two being totally free of charge and the last one with a price of 4€/month.
Thanks to these entities, the different banks are connected, by accessing this link and then the list of compatible institutions, you will be able to see the complete list of banks available for synchronization.
With all these features, synchronizing your account has never been easier, by opening the accounting module you will be able to start the synchronization. One of the advantages of Odoo is that you can synchronize as many bank accounts as necessary, there is no limit, whether they are accounts from the same bank or from different banks. In this way, you can carry out a complete management of your accounting.
To synchronize more than one bank account for the same bank, you only need to duplicate the existing "bank" journal. This function can be carried out from the configuration of the accounting journals.
When synchronizing the account, by default the system will dump transactions from the last three months, however, in case you need to dump transactions from previous periods you can change the date manually, thus selecting all the transactions to be dumped to the system.
What is bank reconciliation and how to perform it in Odoo?
Bank reconciliation is the action of matching a transaction in our bank account with a movement registered in our database. That is, if, for example, we have a payment to a supplier, we can do the reconciliation with the invoice that will exist in our system.
The reconciliation is a great tool to keep track of all our movements, both payments and receipts, in order to keep our accounting up to date.
When reconciling items in Odoo, the system will recognize the transactions dumped from the bank account and will make suggestions for matching with the movements that we have been recording in our database. Thus, filtering by amount, date and contact, Odoo will suggest which transactions have to be reconciled with which items.
As a general rule, the reconciliation of elements will always be manual, Odoo makes the suggestions, but the final matching will be carried out by the person in charge. However, there are some exceptions thanks to the reconciliation models.
These templates are reconciliation rules that can be created so that the system detects when to do the automatic reconciliation. For example, when the quantity matches, with or without a tolerance of a marked quantity, and matches the same tag. In this case, if we check the auto validate option, the reconciliation can be automated.
This automatic reconciliation action will be performed once a day. Even if the configurations are not complex, we always recommend the assistance of our expert digital advisors for accounting-related configurations.
For more technical information you can check the documentation.
Bank Synchronization in Spain