Bank statement

A statement line normally carries a booking date, a value date, a description, a debit or credit amount and a running balance. Finance teams download statements from corporate banking portals, and in Turkey those exports arrive in several shapes: real Excel workbooks, CSV files in either UTF-8 or the older Turkish cp1254 encoding, and files named .xls that are in fact HTML tables. iFinances detects the format from the file content rather than from the extension, maps column headers and the debit or credit sign convention automatically, and asks the user about any field it cannot place. The direct connection a bank offers is ready as well; which route is used is chosen together at setup.

The statement is the only evidence of what money actually did. The ledger says a customer paid; the statement says whether cash arrived, on what date and in what amount. Questions such as which customer an incoming transfer belongs to, whether a supplier invoice was paid twice, or whether a payment ever left the account can be settled only on a statement line. It is also the middle leg of three-source reconciliation: when your ledger and your counterparty's statement disagree about money, the bank line settles it, while whether the document was ever issued is answered by e-invoice data. Under continuous reconciliation the statement flows in daily, so an exception is visible within the same week rather than at period end.

Two confusions are common. A bank statement is not a customer or supplier account statement; the first comes from the bank, the second from your trading partner's ledger, and where the two disagree about a cash movement the bank record is the one with evidential weight. A matching closing balance also does not prove matching lines, because two opposing errors can net to zero. Value dates are a further trap. Description fields on Turkish bank statements are free text, and a transfer booked on the last day of a month may carry a value date in the next one, producing a difference that is real in timing but not in substance. A statement is a period slice, so the opening balance should chain to the prior period's close.