Monthly — and it’s not a task the broker of record can quietly hand off. RECO ties the review to that specific role.
Short answer
RECO requires monthly reconciliation of the brokerage’s real estate trust account, and names exactly who has to do the reviewing: “it is the broker of record’s obligation to review trust account reconciliations monthly.” Letting that review lapse into a rubber stamp, or skip a month, is exactly the gap RECO’s own shortfall bulletin exists to catch.
RECO’s brokerage administration guidance is direct about who owns this: “it is the broker of record’s obligation to review trust account reconciliations monthly.” The purpose is described as a safeguard that protects consumer funds by giving prompt alerts about discrepancies in the real estate trust account. It’s one specific piece of the broker of record’s wider supervision duties — see must the broker of record review every deal — and it’s the one piece RECO names an exact interval for; most of the rest is left to “effective compliance procedures” without a stated frequency.
RECO’s Bulletin 8.2 sets the consequence once a reconciliation turns up a gap: the brokerage must immediately “notify RECO of the shortfall” and “deposit sufficient funds in the account to eliminate the shortfall,” with a narrow carve-out only where the shortfall is purely a bank service fee eliminated as soon as it’s found. A monthly cadence is what stops a small discrepancy from compounding for weeks before anyone notices it.
If reconciliation has slipped to quarterly, or gets delegated without the broker of record actually signing off, that’s not a harmless paperwork shortcut — it’s the one control RECO names by name, so it’s also the first thing a compliance review or a shortfall investigation will ask about. A bounced deposit cheque is exactly the kind of event a monthly reconciliation is built to catch quickly — see what happens if a deposit cheque bounces. A useful discipline: date-stamp each month’s reconciliation and the broker of record’s sign-off separately, rather than treating the software producing a balanced number as the same thing as a person having actually looked at it.
A clean monthly reconciliation tells you the trust ledger balances against the bank statement as of that date — it doesn’t by itself catch a deposit that’s about to fail, or property held in trust that hasn’t been logged yet. Bulletin 8.2 treats non-monetary property the same way it treats money: brokerages must keep written records of everything received in trust and track “every transaction relating to the property held in trust,” with the same immediate notify-and-replace duty if anything goes missing between reconciliation dates. The reconciliation catches what happened last month; the underlying record-keeping is what catches what happens in between.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether your reconciliation process would catch a gap before RECO does.
