You receive bank statements every month either electronically or in the mail. Saving all your statements seems unnecessary. Do you really need to save them?
Keeping your bank statements is always a good idea. What are the benefits of holding onto your bank statements? Is there any way to make statement storage simpler?
We will consider these questions and share some of our insights here.
Bank statements are at the core of accurate accounting
Verifying the banking information is one of the first steps we do to review accounting records. To complete this vital step, bank statements are required. This puts bank statements at the core of accurate accounting.
Bank statements are needed to verify:
- Accuracy of balances
- All transactions are present in the accounting records
- All transactions are entered accurately
You need your bank statements
There are several instances when you may be required to provide bank statements. Some of these could be:
- Applying for a merchant account
- Applying for a loan or government aid
- Undergoing an audit
If you have been saving your bank statements, you will avoid some of the stress that can accompany these events. You will know that providing your statements is something you can check off your list easily.
Of course, the ease of this depends on how well organized your statements are.
Saving your statements can be simple
If you are saving paper copies of your statements, fulfilling a request will require quite a bit of work. Instead of waiting for a request, why not scan those statements and save them right when they are received? It will only take a few minutes at most and can save you a lot of time down the road.
Chances are you are able to retrieve electronic statements from your bank’s online portal. In this case, you may think you can rely on them to be available whenever you need them. However, this may not be the case. You may close the account at a future date or statements for previous years may no longer be available online.
Saving all your statements to your own secure document storage ensures that you have the statements you need when you need them. Apps like Hubdoc or LedgerSync can help with fetching statements from your bank. These apps can also integrate with other secure document storage systems like ShareFile and Dropbox.
Fetching and storing bank statements is an important step to preparing for the year-end. To see what else can be done to be prepared, visit our year-end page.