Bookkeeping QuickBooks Cleanup Help When the bank lines stop
A register with nothing new on it can mean the shop was quiet, or it can mean the feed fell asleep. The statement is how you tell those two apart.
Quiet has two meanings
One meaning is commercial. The door was closed, the invoices stopped, the card was not swiped. The books should show that, and a finished month can say so. The other meaning is mechanical. The connection to the bank expired, the card account needs a fresh approval, or the feed simply stopped on a Tuesday. The register looks the same in both cases. The statement does not.
We ask for the statement date and the date of the last line in the file. If the statement is newer, the feed is behind. If they match, the quiet is probably real. You do not need to hand over a login for that comparison. You can hold the statement next to the screen, or you can read the two dates out loud.
What a nap in the feed hides
A feed that naps hides the ordinary mess. A customer payment. A refund. A monthly software charge. An owner transfer that landed on Friday. None of those are visible while the connection sleeps, so a month closed on a napping feed is a month closed on a partial story. We would rather leave the month open for a week than explain the partial story later.
Holding accounts suffer most. Money goes in when a sale is recorded and is supposed to leave when the payout arrives. If the payout's feed is the one that napped, the holding account keeps a balance that is really cash in the bank. Closing on top of that balance double-counts nothing and explains nothing. We name the balance and we wait.
How the lines come back
You sign in. The bank asks if it is you. You say yes on your own phone. The lines arrive, sometimes in a clump, sometimes with duplicates of lines you already keyed by hand. Duplicates are a second job. We match them before anyone celebrates the clump. A duplicated deposit is a fake sale, and a fake sale is the thing this site is trying not to leave in the file.
If the feed will not wake up, the statement is still enough. Keying a month from a statement is slower and it is honest. That choice gets said out loud before the call ends. The password for the bank stays yours either way.
The feed went quiet.
Say the date of the last bank line you can see.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.