Confirmation letter
A confirmation letter is the document sent to a counterparty asking them to confirm, in writing, the current account balance as of a stated cut-off date. Also called a reconciliation letter, its purpose is to evidence that two sets of books meet at the same figure.
Letters typically go out at period end, ahead of an audit, or whenever a trading relationship is being reviewed. The letter carries the cut-off date, the balance, the currency and usually the list of items behind that balance; the counterparty either confirms the figure or objects by stating their own. The channel can be e-mail, registered electronic mail, paper or a secure link, and what matters is that both the dispatch and the reply are archived in a traceable form. In a well-run process every reply also identifies which item is in dispute, not just whether the total agrees.
A confirmation letter is not the reconciliation itself; it is the record of its outcome. A confirmed balance does not mean the underlying lines were matched correctly, because two parties can agree on a total while holding different items beneath it. The letter therefore earns its value when it follows item-level comparison: when an objection arrives, the invoice, payment or credit note causing the gap is already known, and the number of rounds of correspondence drops. The blank form, where the balance is left out and the counterparty is asked to state their own figure, makes the reply more independent, which is why auditors reach for it; the trade-off is a lower response rate, so it is not used in every relationship.
One legal point is regularly misunderstood in Türkiye. Article 94 of the Turkish Commercial Code provides that a current account balance not objected to within one month is deemed accepted, but that consequence sits in the context of a written current account agreement, and where the written form requirement of Article 89 is not met, silence may not produce automatic acceptance. A second misunderstanding is that the letter replaced Form Ba-Bs, the tax filing that used to cross-check purchases and sales between taxpayers. Ba-Bs was abolished from the September 2024 period onward with no replacement filing, and a confirmation letter has always served a different purpose: direct verification between two trading parties.
Example
A group subsidiary sends confirmations at a 30 June cut-off. One supplier replies with 1,910,000 TRY against the 1,845,000 TRY carried in the ledger, a gap of 65,000 TRY. Item-level comparison splits it in two: 47,000 TRY from an invoice issued on 28 June that only reached accounts payable in July, and 18,000 TRY from a credit note booked on one side and not the other. Neither is an error in the balance so much as a difference in timing and in what each side has processed so far. The explanation, the cut-off date, the reply and the signed copy are archived together, so the next period starts from an agreed position instead of reopening the same two lines. Figures are illustrative.
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