You finished the month and the bank page still does not match. An open month is a month the bank has not agreed with yet, and Steven Palmieri, a Tax CFO and the Entrepreneur's CFO, closes it with us before a return is allowed to borrow any figure from it.
We start with the statement, not with a story about how the month felt. Deposits, checks, and card batches either match the books or they do not. When they do not, we list the open items and we clear the ones that have a real explanation.
A category that is merely convenient is not a close. Meals, inventory, and a draw each have a place. Mixing them makes the later return look smoother than the year was, and we will not do that to save an afternoon.
If a vendor bill is missing, the month stays open on that point. We leave the line blank rather than inventing a tidy figure that would make the month look done. You can tell us the bill is coming. Until it arrives, the report says so.
The same rule covers a transfer between your accounts. If the money left one bank and has not landed in the other, both sides show the gap. We do not net it away.
We can set payroll up on the provider you run. From the first Friday after setup, you are the one who releases the pay run. The wage figures come back into the books as part of the close. Once that setup is running, the Friday pay run stays yours, and we are not standing in the middle of it.
Memorial Park sits inside the Loop, across from the Memorial neighborhoods, and every Texan who drives that way knows the trees. We share that drive with you. The question we bring back is which month is still open, because the park does not close the books.
When the bank agrees, you get a short note in ordinary words. It names the balance, the items still open, and any category we changed. You can ask about one line without a tour of the whole file. We would rather explain a single odd deposit than hide it inside a total.
The next month starts from that close. We do not reopen a finished month because a new bill feels related. If the bill belongs in the closed month and the first entry was wrong, we correct it with a dated line you can see. The return later follows that trail, and the trail is why the month was closed.
If you want the walk, ask for one deposit by the date it hit the bank. We open the statement next to the books and show the match, or we show the item that is still in the way. Several open items get a list in the order the bank printed them, and we clear that list one line at a time. A deposit you cannot explain out loud is a deposit the month is not ready to use, even when the total looks calm.
Tell us the month the bank already agrees with, and name the month that is still unfinished.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.