Reconciliation Meaning: Mending Ties and Matching Numbers

Every reconciliation meaning, listed

1. Making peace between people. Friends, couples, families or communities restore trust after a conflict. The reconciliation between the two neighbours took years.
2. Matching records. Checking that two sets of figures agree and explaining any difference. The accounts team finishes the bank reconciliation on the fifth of every month.
3. Bringing ideas into harmony. Showing that two beliefs or facts that seem to clash can both stand. The essay attempts a reconciliation of freedom and safety.
4. A religious sense. In Christian teaching, reconciliation describes restored relationship between God and people, and in the Catholic Church the Sacrament of Reconciliation is another name for confession.
5. Healing a society. After war or deep injustice, national reconciliation means efforts to rebuild trust between groups.

Reconciliation in sentences

• After a year apart, the couple announced their reconciliation to close friends.
• Her cousin's wedding became a quiet moment of reconciliation for the whole family.
• The supplier's statement did not match our ledger, so we did a reconciliation line by line.
• Many small businesses in India run a monthly GST reconciliation to match their purchase records with what suppliers have filed.
• He found no easy reconciliation between his love of city life and his wish for a quiet garden.

How a bank reconciliation works

Here is the accounting sense with simple numbers. A shop's own cash book shows a balance of 52,000 at the end of the month. The bank statement shows 48,500. The task is to explain the 3,500 gap.

1. A cheque for 4,000 that the shop deposited on the last day has not yet been credited by the bank. Add it to the bank figure: 52,500.
2. The bank charged a 500 service fee that the shop has not recorded. Take it off the cash book figure: 51,500.
3. A supplier cheque for 1,000 that the shop issued has not yet been presented. Take it off the bank figure: 51,500.

Both adjusted figures now read 51,500, so the records are reconciled. If they still did not match, the gap could point to a mistake or a missing entry. Regular reconciliation helps catch errors and fraud early, which is why auditors and tax rules expect it.

In public life and law

After civil wars, dictatorships or long periods of injustice, some countries have set up truth and reconciliation commissions. These bodies collect accounts of what happened, give victims a hearing and try to help a divided society move forward. South Africa's commission after the end of apartheid is a widely studied example. People disagree about how well such bodies balance truth, justice and forgiveness, and the word itself can carry hope for some and doubt for others.

In the United States, budget reconciliation is a special procedure in Congress that lets certain tax and spending bills pass the Senate with a simple majority and limited debate. It is named for the process of bringing laws into line with budget targets.

In family law, the term can describe attempts by separated spouses to repair their marriage, and some courts encourage this before granting a divorce.

A word with a long religious history

In the mid-1300s, when English first used it, the word meant the renewal of friendship after disagreement, used especially of God and sinners. It came from Old French reconciliacion and Latin reconciliatio, from the verb reconciliare, to bring together again. The broader sense of making things consistent is recorded from 1729, and the verb reconcile had already gained the sense of making conflicting facts agree in the 1550s, and that is where the bookkeeping sense grew from.

Using reconcile and reconciliation

The verb takes several patterns: reconcile with someone, be reconciled to a situation (accept it), and reconcile A with B (make two things fit together). She was reconciled to the long commute means she has accepted it, not that she made peace with a person.

Common pairings include seek reconciliation, attempt at reconciliation, family reconciliation, account reconciliation and a spirit of reconciliation. The adjective irreconcilable describes differences too deep to settle. Close ideas on this site include atonement, redemption and grace in faith, and conflict as its starting point. Explore more law and society terms for related public-life words.