Your Business Bookkeeping Is a MessThe second person names the check

A buyer is asking for one month

When a buyer says the books will not survive a look, the sentence is about a path, not about your character. The path runs from a deposit in the bank to the profit on that month. If the path has a gap, the look stops. A speech about how hard the year was does not fill the gap. One closed month that a stranger can open does.

We pick a month that has a statement, a set of deposits, and enough paper to say what each large deposit was. Then we close that month. Cash that only shifted from one account of yours into another account of yours comes out of the sales total. Money you put in yourself leaves that total too. A customer payment stays. What remains is a profit a buyer can follow without calling you to translate every line.

The other months are not ignored forever. They wait. Closing twelve months at once, while a buyer is already in the room, is how errors get papered over. One month a stranger can follow beats a year that was dressed for the meeting.

The second person is the speaker

The insult feels personal because it lands on you. The check is about the second person, the one who spoke. Their role tells us which artifact to build first. A buyer gets a month. A preparer gets two figures from a filed year. A lender gets a tie-out, or a plain no if the letter wants an assuring signature. A spouse gets one week of a shared card, each charge marked company or household.

That is why we ask you to paste the sentence and name the role, and why we do not ask for their address. We are not recruiting you against them. If they were right, say so. Agreement does not block the check. It often makes the check shorter, because you already know which week or which year they meant.

What a feed will not decide for you

A feed can propose a category from last time. Last time might have been wrong, or last time might have been a different kind of deposit that happened to share an amount. We do not accept a pile of suggestions and call the month closed. Each line that matters gets a source. Customer, owner, loan, or a move between accounts. If the source is missing, the line stays in a holding spot on the balance sheet where you can see the question.

A holding spot is temporary on purpose. It is removed when it is empty, not when someone is tired of looking at it. Guessing the balance into an expense cleans the screen and dirties the return.