Bookkeeper QuickBooks ProAdvisorThe month a program does not close

A bank feed saves typing. It does not know which deposit was a sale, which transfer was the owner, or which charge belonged to the household. A rule can guess a category from a vendor name. The guess is a draft. The close is the review of the draft against the statement.

We reconcile to the statement date, not to a feeling about the month. The figure on the statement and the figure in the register either match or they do not. We write the difference down before we do anything clever with it.

Outstanding checks stay listed and get aged. Deposits that never arrived get reversed in the month we notice. Clearing accounts go to zero or the month stays open. Household costs are split to the portion the shop consumed, and the original home phone line stays personal. The chart names are ones the return can read, and unused empty names get archived rather than deleted.

None of those steps is a feature the directory listing performs. They are the month. A program can store them. A person has to decide them.

The month stops when a later change would be a new entry, not a quiet edit. We will still correct a mistake. The correction is visible. It names the month it touches. That habit is what lets a return, a lender, or a buyer trust the year without asking us to remember a conversation.

If your file has not been through this loop in a long time, say so. The first month takes longer than the twelfth. We would rather start with one statement than promise the whole year on a call.

A program can store every step above. It still will not decide them. The decision is the close, and the close is the work these pages are for.