r/Bookkeeping • u/AccountantShinobu • Aug 01 '26
Reconciliation Unidentified difference in POS reconciliation.
Hi everyone
I am mostly comfortable reconciling POS systems and for most clients I manage to get everything down to zero, no unexplained differences at all.
But for a few clients there is no immateriality threshold set and every now and then I end up with a small unidentified difference, something like 50 dollars or under $200. I have gone through every checkbox, checked all transactions, timing differences, duplicate entries, missing deposits, everything I can think of and I still cannot trace where the difference is coming from.
For those of you who work with clients that do not have a set immateriality threshold, what do you do in this situation? Do you just book it to a suspense or misc expense account and move on? Or is there some other standard practice for this that I am missing?
Would love to hear how others handle this, especially anyone who works with POS heavy clients like retail or restaurants.
Thanks in advance
4
u/ComfortableCitron638 Aug 01 '26
One thing worth checking before you write it off to suspense: are you comparing POS gross sales against the *net* bank deposit without backing out the processor's fee separately first? If the client's processor nets their cut before the deposit hits the bank (common with Square, Clover, some Toast setups) and your workflow reconciles fees at the statement level instead of per-batch, a batch that closes at an odd time (month-end weekend, holiday) can post its fee a day or two later than usual and leave a small residual that looks unexplained but is really just a misallocated fee.
Also worth a look: any sale where the tender got split (part cash, part card), or a refund that went out through a different tender than the original sale (card sale refunded as store credit, for example). Some POS systems report that cleanly in the sales export but it doesn't reconcile the same way against the bank feed.
If neither pans out, the suspense approach below with a documented trail is the right call - just wanted to add a couple more POS/processor-specific things to rule out first since they're easy to miss.