How to Understand Your Bank Statement

"Hi! This is Summer on behalf of expertvillage.com in this clip we’re going to be going over how to read a bank statement. Obviously every financial institution’s are a little bit different so their statements are going to be a little bit different but you want to make sure you at least get one statement per month because I recommend balancing your checkbook to your bank statement at least once per month. Also most banks don’t send copies of your cleared checks with your statement each month, basically they may not do this because it saves that bank or credit union money by not sending the actual physical check in your statement but your statement should always at least show what check number has cleared and what checks are still outstanding. This is also going to come in handy if you have those carbons in your checkbook that we talked about earlier because then basically you do have a carbon copy so that would be some sort of copy that’ll show what checks you have written that month. So we’re just going to go over this basic statement here, again I blacked out personal information on here so that’s not visible, on the top you’re going to check the dates to find out what dates you’re going to be balancing your checkbook from whether it be the 1st to the 30th or the 26th through the 25th just make sure that those dates correspond to the last month and the last time your checkbook balanced. So basically I’m here this bank statement has a basic rundown of what had happened in this checking account that month and then of course it itemizes all the transactions down here for you when we actually get in to reconciling the checkbook we’ll use that section of the statement but up here you’ll see they’ll show usually a beginning balance, what the total deposits were made for that statement cycle, what drafts cleared which draft is basically a check, miscellaneous debits would be you know debit card transactions anything automatic payment or anything that came out of the account automatically, maintenance or service charges would be any type of fees that the bank or credit union had charged you that month and then it’ll give you an ending balance. So basically this ending balance is what we’re going to use when we’re reconciling your checkbook and compare that to what you have for an ending balance in your register and down here you’ll see it itemizes all the transactions that were done that month and then the next clip we’ll actually go over how we want to reconcile that and check it off in our register and make sure that our register balances to what the statement shows."