It CAN Be Done!

By Eddie Nelson

 

How to get your balance sheet in balance

 

  1. Reconcile your bank statements using the reconcile button in Bank Ledgers.  This means:  Make TCS bank ledgers match your bank statements from the bank.
  2. Verify that all items showing in damage deposits held are accurate
  3. Verify that all items showing in prepayments held are accurate
  4. Look at owner accounts mode on current, set the start date to 1/1/1980, set the end date to the last date you balanced forward.  Make sure there are not old items left out there that were set to “N” don’t pay.  Verify all items in the current period
  5. Look at vendor payables and verify there aren’t any old items that need to be cleared out.
  6. Make sure there are no old taxes that need to be cleared out of the system.
  7. Once all the previous items are addressed the amount of difference on the balance sheet is the amount your escrow is out of balance.
  8. Make the necessary adjustments to your escrow account by writing a check or making a deposit depending whether you are short or over.
  9. You are back in balance.
  10.   Always print your balance sheet before and after you print owner checks, balance forward owner accounts, pay vendors, pay taxes, do damage deposits/ prepayment refunds, or make bank deposits.  If you are in the habit of always printing your balance sheet before performing the various accounting functions you can catch mistakes as they happened, greatly reducing the amount of time required to find your mistake.

 

 

Things that will cause you to be out of balance

 

  1. Failure to account for and replace credit card fees if they are being deducted from your escrow account
  2. Hand written checks.  If you cut all of your checks from the software and post them to the bank ledger, the checks on your bank statement cannot be different from the TCS bank ledger unless there is a bank error.
  3. Receiving a prepayment as a regular balance payment or rent received account.
  4. Manually marking items as already having been paid or not paid in vendor payables, owner accounts, or tax payables.
  5. Changing transactions that have already been paid.  The system should not let you.
  6. Deleting paid transactions.  The system should not let you.
  7. Trying to do your escrow accounting in some other system.  This eats up a lot of extra time re-entering the financial data into the other system and opens up more chance of a data entry error.  The extra time would be better spent learning how to do it all correctly in TCS.