What is the difference between remove and redo, delete and reconcile or unreconcile in Xero accounts? It can be confusing when tidying up your bank account to know where you should look and which option you should use ...
Remove and redo on an invoice or bill payment deletes the receipt or bill payment, but then returns the bill or receipt to being unpaid. On a spend money or receive money transaction this will delete the transaction. The way you can identify which is which is that if the transaction is connected to an invoice or bill it will say 'payment' before the contact name on the transaction pages.
If the invoice or bill is not needed you need to go and void that too; often my clients put invoices in twice and pay both so you have to delete them in two stages. In both cases, the imported bank transaction it had been reconciled to is returned to the reconcile page where it can be reconciled again.
Unreconcile just removes the link between the imported bank statement line and the entry in Xero, but doesn't delete anything. It is useful if a transaction has been allocated against a bank entry on the wrong date, but is still needed. I find that handy with clients who have a monthly bill going out for the same amount who then get out of sync with their allocations.
Remove and redo deletes the payment or receipt, but then if it is associated with an invoice the invoice will then be marked as outstanding again and the imported bank transaction it had been reconciled to is returned to the reconcile page where it can be reconciled again. This will then leave you in the invoice or bill so you can see if you need to void it or not.
If you choose to remove and redo from the account transactions page, it just deletes the payment or receipt, and if it was associated with an invoice you would need to go and find it yourself to void if needed so I prefer to do option 2. That isn't a problem if it is a spend or receive money transaction.
The last thing you might want to delete in the bank is duplicate statement lines if you have accidentally imported the same transaction twice or the bank feed has had a funny turn which does happen from time to time.
If you delete a bank statement line which has already been reconciled then you would also then need to go to the account transactions page and delete it there too as the deletion only deletes the imported statement line, not the associated transactions.
This is only needed if imports or bank feeds have gone wrong. If you delete an unreconciled bank statement line then there is nothing else to remove. You can always see on the page if lines have been deleted from the bank statement and you can choose to restore them if they have been deleted incorrectly.
When an item is on the transaction page and is unreconciled and you know the payment should be there, but there was no bank feed or imported statement line to reconcile it to, then you can choose to reconcile manually. This is good if the bank had a blip and just missed one import or if you are just missing a few days of transactions.
When you manually mark an item as reconciled it will then appear on the bank statements page as a 'source' user and the account transactions page as reconciled.
You may need to 'enable mark as reconciled' if the option is not available to you. This can be found at the bottom of the menu when you click on the ? in the top menu bar in Xero when you are in a bank account. It switches it on for all bank accounts, but for your log in only.
As always, if all this information is a bit overwhelming and you just need some help getting your Xero all spick and span and correct then you can book a handholding session with me to go through it with you and show you how all the options work!
I do also undertake Xero tidying jobs as I find it very satisfying getting a messy Xero company all neat and tidy.
If anything I've written here resonates with you, call me on 01604 420057 and let's see how we can help you.