Now reading · Trust
Reconciled by the month, not by the miracle
· 1 min read
What we learned building sales and rentals trust accounting to the NSW rules, and why the audit pack should be an export.
Every licensee we spoke to described the same three days. The first of the month arrives, the statements come in, and somebody who would rather be listing property spends until Wednesday reconciling an account by eye.
The reason is almost never arithmetic. It is that the receipt and the reason for the receipt live in different places: the bank feed knows an amount and a date, and a person has to remember it was the Ellis deposit on 14 Kembla Street under the campaign that opened in February.
So we did not build a reconciliation screen. We built receipting where a receipt is money held for a named party, against a named property, under a named engagement — and the reconciliation falls out of that. What is outstanding is a query, not a memory, and the audit pack is an export rather than a fortnight of somebody's life.
- Two accounts, properly separated: sales and rentals, each with its own ledger and its own reconciliation.
- Every movement against its property: so the trial balance and the file can never disagree.
- Prepared as you go: the month's position is current on the eleventh, not assembled on the first.
Your auditor is welcome to look at it before you commit. We would rather they did.
More from the blog
- Operations and compliance, every page in the demoEvery page, dialog and write of the first three phases now works in the demo agency. What that covers, area by area, and what comes after it.Read more
- Why the demo moved into the browserIn two days the demo agency moved twice: first into a branch inside every service, then out of the server altogether. What we got wrong the first time, and why the second answer holds.Read more
- The property is the fileWhy Briesa files the transaction under the property, and every other system does it the other way round.Read more