Back to Basics: How to Keep Your Bank and Credit Card Clean
By John Charette, CPA, CMA – Owner & Your CFO at Phoenix CFO Solutions
Every business owner has a bank account and, in most cases, a business credit card. And if you’re still running business activity through your personal accounts, stop reading, fix that, and come back. Nothing else works until that’s handled.
Your bank and credit card are not just places money moves through. They are the operational backbone of your financials. Every report you look at depends on them being right. When they’re clean, your books are usable. When they’re not, everything downstream is suspect.
In this post, you’ll learn how to keep your bank and credit card clean, controlled, and easy to manage so month-end stops being painful and your numbers start making sense.
Weekly Reconciliation Prevents Month-End Chaos
Reconciling your bank and credit card at least once a week is one of the simplest ways to stay in control of your books.
You don’t want to scramble at month-end trying to remember what transactions were for. Weekly review means syncing your accounting software to the bank and credit card portals, confirming every transaction is present, checking for duplicates or errors, and making sure items are categorized and matched correctly.
This matters because the longer you wait, the harder the answers become. Not every charge is obvious. When research drags into month-end, it slows down the entire close and wastes time that could have been avoided with consistent review.
Make sure your bank and credit card feeds are properly synced to your accounting software so matching is fast and clean. Just as important, have a simple process with your operations team to identify unclear charges without endless back-and-forth. If you’re comfortable, reconcile directly inside your accounting software weekly while reviewing the bank portal. Checking items off as you go weekly makes month end reconciliation faster and immediately highlights anything that needs fixing.
Clean Bill Pay and Revenue Systems Keep the Bank Usable
A weak bill pay or customer payment process turns your bank account into noise instead of information.
When payments aren’t tracked properly, disputes follow. Vendors question what’s been paid. Customers push back on balances. Deposits hit the bank without clear explanation. The result is confusion, wasted time, and uncomfortable conversations that could have been avoided.
If you have bill pay or revenue systems, keep them synced and reviewed. When systems talk to each other, it’s easier to see what’s owed, what’s been paid, and what’s still outstanding. If you’re not using software, you still need structure. Generate receipts or remittance records so obligations are clearly documented and defensible.
Weekly reconciliation helps here too. Addressing discrepancies quickly makes them easier to solve. The longer you wait, the harder those conversations become with vendors or customers, and the more credibility you lose.
A Strong Support Process Makes Transactions Obvious
You should be able to look at a charge on your bank or credit card and immediately know what it was for.
That’s a game-changer. It means coding is accurate. Reports are reliable. Decisions are based on reality instead of assumptions.
If people in your business have purchasing authority, they need to provide basic support. Ideally, that happens before a purchase. If it has to happen after the fact, expectations still need to be clear. A receipt, a short explanation of what was bought, and why it was business-related should be non-negotiable. If it ties to a job or project, that should be noted as well.
Keep the support requirements simple: who bought it, what it was, when it happened, where it was, and why it was needed. Without this, accounting turns into constant back-and-forth. And once a purchase is already made, getting clean answers later is always harder.
Every business has tension between operations and accounting. That tension only increases as the business grows or resources stay tight. You have to decide how many people can spend, what approval looks like, and what support is required so charges make sense when they hit the books.
Clean Accounts Are the Litmus Test
A clean bank and credit card are the clearest signal of whether a business has its financial house in order. If these accounts are messy, the more complex areas of accounting are almost always worse or nonexistent.
This is where Phoenix CFO Solutions steps in. We take over the process, reconcile accounts properly, and put structure in place so things stay clean. We’ve done this for numerous businesses, and the result is simple: faster closes, clearer reporting, and numbers you can trust.
You should’ve fixed this already.
The next best time is today.
Book a free consultation with Phoenix CFO Solutions and let’s get your bank and credit card clean, controlled, and working for you instead of against you.