An owner can watch the bank screen turn green and still have a deposit with no class. A green match means the ending balance agrees. A matched ending balance still leaves each deposit unnamed until someone names it.
Read the blank class.
Bank feeds are good at the ending number. They are careless about the meaning. A deposit can match and still have a blank class, a blank customer, and a blank tax item. The report then prints a profit that is really just the bank.
We treat the blank as still open. The month is not closed because a screen turned green. The month is closed when a person can say what each deposit was. Sale, owner money, loan, refund, or transfer. Those five are not one category.
TS-028 is the shape of that close in our library. The feed is step one. The naming is the rest. TS-047 is the reminder that a deposit is not automatically income. Both ideas show up in ordinary months, not only in disasters.
A chart of accounts with a dozen near duplicate categories makes the blank more likely, because the person entering the deposit gives up. We archive the dead categories and keep the live ones few enough to choose from. Choice requires a short list. A long list produces blanks.
A processor payout arrived net of fees, and the fee never got its own line. Revenue is short by the fee, or the fee is hiding inside a negative deposit. Either way the margin is wrong.
An owner transfer into the business account was coded as a sale. The business looks profitable. The owner looks like a customer. A lender who reads the report is reading a story the bank transfer did not tell.
A transfer between two accounts of the same business was coded as income on one side and never removed on the other. The total doubles. The match on each account still looks perfect, because each account agrees with itself.
A loan payment was posted entirely to interest, or entirely to principal, because the split was never set up. The balance sheet and the profit report cannot both be right. One of them is absorbing the whole payment.
A customer payment included a tip or a pass through amount that is not revenue. The staff or the charity is owed that money. The profit report has already spent it in the owner's imagination.
A vendor refund was coded as a sale. Income went up. The expense that was refunded stayed high. The month celebrates a fake sale and keeps a fake cost.
We send the month with the blanks named, the fee on its own line, and a short note on anything we had to assume. Assumptions are labeled. A labeled assumption can be corrected. A silent assumption becomes next month's template.
If the prior months used the same wrong pattern, we say so. Fixing one month and leaving eleven siblings wrong makes the year disagree with itself. The return will notice even if the owner is tired of noticing.
Uncleared checks and old deposits in transit get a look too. A reconciliation that forces the difference into an opening balance is not a reconciliation. It is a rug. We would rather show the old item than bury it.
Bring the month that is green and the one deposit you cannot explain. We will name the deposit before we touch the rest. Most repeated errors are that one deposit copied forward by a bank rule that nobody remembers creating. The rule can be retired once the deposit has a true name.
Say how many months are open, and whether the bank screen already shows a match.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.