CPA Midland AlternativeClose the month the check arrived

The statement and the bank are telling two sizes of the same story until someone writes them down together. Gross is what the production sold for. The production tax is what the first purchaser already sent to the state. Net is what reached you. If the books record the gross, income is high and a tax expense is missing. If the books record only the net and never name the tax, the year looks smaller than the field and the return has nothing to tie the withholding to.

We keep those three words on the month the check arrived. Your figures stay in your file. The page can show the shape without printing a balance that would be yours.

A deposit on the second of a month belongs to the month the bank shows, unless the statement itself is for work the prior month already earned and you have a reason you can explain. We would rather label a cutoff than smooth a chart.

We open the statement and name the lines. We open the bank and find the deposit. We look for the same dollars and the same date. Anything that does not match stays on a list with a name, not in a bucket called other. Uncleared items stay uncleared until they clear or until you tell us they will not.

A feed that imports every night is useful only if someone reads it. Rules that guess a category are useful only when a person checks the ones that landed in the wrong place. We do that check. A month with a suspense balance is not a closed month.

Reports come after that. A profit and loss for a month that does not tie to the bank is a story, not a close. We would rather hand you a short package you can trust than a long one you have to apologize for.

Every Texan knows the Reporter-Telegram as the paper this city reads with coffee. We read a hometown paper the way any Texan does, without claiming the porch it lands on, and we still notice the invoice. An ad that ran in that paper belongs in the month it ran, not in the month the statement finally got opened.

The same habit covers the yard. A fuel bill, a hot shot ticket, and a royalty deposit can all hit in one week. Each one gets the month it belongs to. That is the whole discipline. It is also the reason a close has a date on the calendar instead of a mood.

Closed months are what a return can stand on. Estimates stop being a surprise. A lender who wants a package gets numbers that match the bank. October can be a real conversation about the year, because the year is visible.

If the months are not closed, we say so before we talk about anything else. Cleaning that up is sometimes the whole first engagement. We would rather do that well than pretend the return can be written on top of a fog.

The order is dull on purpose. First the bank, then the statement, then the names on anything that does not match. A royalty deposit, a fuel ticket, and a payroll draft can hit the same week and still belong to three different stories. We do not let the loudest one decide the month.

Owners around the field often keep two piles without meaning to. One pile is what the purchaser already netted. The other is what the yard spent. Mixing them makes the month look either heroic or broke, and neither reading survives a second look. We keep the piles apart until each one has a month.

When the list of open items gets short, we stop. A closed month is allowed to be a little boring. The relief is that you can hand the report to a partner or a lender and not preface it with an apology. That is the feeling we are aiming at, more than a longer package.

If you already trust a prior month, we start after it. We do not reopen a year for sport. We also do not pretend a month is closed because the software says the feed imported. Imported and read are different. The second one is the work.