Purchase Card Manual: Recording, Coding and Reconciling Purchases

• Recording and Coding Purchases
• Reconciliation Procedures
• Fiscal Year-End

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Recording and Coding Purchases

Ministries must put systems in place to facilitate recording purchase details and account coding for each transaction to ensure that statements can be reconciled. The Office of the Comptroller General has developed forms to support ministry cardholders log purchases and reconcile transactions with monthly statements, and also to evidence expense authority approval of purchases. Purchase Card Transaction Register forms are available on the OCG Forms site (government access only).

As a minimum, cardholders must record:

• date of purchase;
• item and quantity;
• supplier name;
• account coding
• dollar amount; and
• identity of expense authority who approved the purchase.

Cardholders must retain all documentation pertaining to their purchases, including receipts, invoices, fax follow-up letters, contracts, printouts of Internet order confirmations and emails or other forms on which expense authorities initiate expenditures.

Reconciliation Procedures

Purchase card statements will be made available to cardholders after the end of the billing cycle, which is the third day of the month. Electronic statements are available within 24 hours of the end of the billing cycle. Paper statements (if requested) usually take two weeks to be sent to the cardholder. It is the responsibility of the expense authority to ensure that cardholders reconcile their statements to their transaction registers in a timely fashion and submit them to their expense authority for approval and processing.

The full purchase card number must not be transmitted by email either in a message or its attachment to reduce the opportunity for fraud and improper use of the card. In addition, all but the last 4 digits of the card number must be blacked out from card statements that are electronically attached or stored in the CAS Oracle financial system.

Fiscal Year-End

Ministries must ensure that purchases are recorded in the correct fiscal period. This may require the accrual of some transactions in the April purchasing card statement. Ministries should be mindful that there may be some April purchases appearing on this statement. April purchases should not be included in the year end accrual.

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