Bookkeeping QuickBooks Cleanup Help A month that meets the bank
A reconciled badge can appear while older items are still open. The month matches only when those items are on the list, not when the difference first hits zero.
The badge is a start, not a finish
The checking screen is happy to declare victory. You click the statement balance, the difference drops to zero, and a badge appears. That moment is real, and it is also early. Anything dated before the statement, and still not cleared, can sit outside the math. The badge does not go look for it.
We open the list of uncleared items on purpose. A check the vendor never took to the bank is still your check. A deposit the bank recorded and the books missed is still the bank's deposit. A transfer between two accounts you own is not income, even if one side of it cleared and the other side is still sitting in a holding spot.
What we line up, in order
First the operating account, through the statement date. Then the cards, through their own dates, which are rarely the same day. Then the loan, at least to the payment that actually left. Then the items that never cleared. The order matters because a card payment is often a transfer, and coding it as an expense a second time is how a month looks worse than it was.
Wages show up in this sequence only as a report from the company that already pays people. We set the books up to receive that report. We do not invent the wage figure, and we do not become the provider. If the report and the bank disagree, the month is not ready, and the return waits with it.
When the month should stay open
Leave the month open when the feed is behind the statement, when a holding account still has a balance you cannot explain, or when the year already filed used a number this month would change. Leaving the month open is the honest choice while that list is unfinished. A closed month that is wrong is a story you have to unwind in front of a lender or the agency.
Steven Palmieri will say which months can close and which ones wait. The books are kept on the ones that can close. The return is prepared from those, not from a screen that merely looks calm.
Say the month.
Name the month on the screen and whether the badge is already showing.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.