CPA & Tax Firm v2225

Clients

What they hold

Where the books stand

Every number here is computed from the entries, now — there is no month to close before you can look.

The profit and loss, the balance sheet and the cash flows this ledger produces are on their own tab. Show me the P&L and balance sheet

What we found

Worst first. Each one points at the entries that make the case.

Which companies are thriving, which need attention, and what to do

Cross-entity performance scorecard, Fixed-vs-Variable Break-Even & Margin Squeeze detector, 13-Week Rolling Cash Runway & Quarterly Tax Reserve forecaster, and Proactive Books-Freshness & Missing-Document Radar.

Every company, and what sits inside it. Open a belonging to see the accounts it puts on the chart. Drag one onto another company to move it — you will be asked whether it was always theirs or moved on a date, because those are different things.

Given away, and still counting

Held with somebody else

Record something they hold

Companies

Each person, and the companies they own. A company can be created on its own or under somebody — the same shape as Ledgerly.

Your provider's paperwork

Who worked where, and what their hour costs

An hour is costed at the rate in force on the day it was worked, so a raise does not change what an earlier month cost. Rates are fully loaded — the wage plus the employer taxes on it — because a cost report built on the bare wage understates every job by the same invisible percentage. Labour on a build is basis (§263A), not this year's expense.

Held for the government

Tax withheld from employees is their money, not the company's. Unpaid, it is assessed against a person — it survives the company and is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

Pay runs recorded

Every run that reached the ledger, newest first, with the figures read back off the accounts rather than from what was typed — so a run corrected later shows the corrected amount.

Questions we need answered

Each one says why it matters and exactly what would settle it. The ones marked blocking are holding a number back.

What the owner answered

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Profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow

Form 990 workpaper (Parts VIII, IX, X & Schedules A/B)

Exempt organization statement of revenue (Part VIII), statement of functional expenses split across Program / Management & General / Fundraising (Part IX), and ASC 958 balance sheet with donor restrictions (Part X). Any unallocated or unclassified figure is listed with what it needs rather than guessed.

What is making money, and what is not

Every building, job, vehicle and pay run this client has — worst first, while the year is still open and something can be done about it. A year-end report is a post-mortem.

What they are worth

Through everything they own, at every tier. A share held through a holding company is the product of the percentages down the chain, not a lookup — and anything with no current value recorded is counted at what was paid, which is said plainly rather than hidden in the total.

Ask it anything

Pick what the rows are and how the columns are split. The same question answered both ways: one kind of money across everything, or everything on one thing.

How each property is let

Long, short or in between. It decides the depreciation life, whether it is a rental activity at all, and what may be grouped with what — and it is worked out from the nights, not from a label somebody chose.

Where this year lands

Actuals so far, plus what the rest of the year looks like it will do. Each line says WHY it was projected that way — a rent that recurs is not guessed the same way as a repair bill that does not.

Worth doing before the year ends

Found by looking at what this client actually holds, not from a checklist. Each one says what it is worth, or why it cannot say — and what it would need to know to be sure.

Finished years

Sealing a year freezes it across the whole tree and writes down what it was — which companies were in it, what each closed at, which groups existed. Nothing is deleted and every document stays attached. It reopens, with a reason.

What books understands

The kinds of thing it can keep books about, what each one is measured by, and which rules read those measures. A new kind is a data file, not a release.

Grouped by who asks for them, because that is how they are asked for: a surety wants five specific documents together and sends back a submission missing one. Every report here can be viewed on-screen, copied to Excel, taken away as a spreadsheet, or printed with your name on it — and the ones books cannot produce yet are listed too, so you find out here rather than in front of somebody.

Bring in & validate another firm’s books in one shot

Upload or paste a QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop (.IIF), Xero, Wave, Buildium, or AppFolio Trial Balance or General Ledger export. Bring books in & validate in one shot maps their chart of accounts (auto-creating any missing accounts), posts the opening balances and/or full transaction history into the selected company’s live Books, and immediately runs both the forensic audit and live Balance Sheet / P&L validation.

One-Click Books → Ledgerly Tax Return Bridge & Tax Software Auto-Populate

Run the 5-point Month-End Close & Tax Readiness check, compare Cash vs. Accrual basis (with IRC §481(a) adjustment), inspect Schedule L / M-1 / M-2 & line-by-line GL audit provenance, sync live workpapers + Partner K-1s directly into a Ledgerly Tax Engagement in one click, or download the 3-layer Tax Software Auto-Populate Bundle (Drake, Lacerte, UltraTax, CCH, ProSeries).

Jobs still running

What has been earned on each job against what has been billed for it, and whether the margin is holding. A job whose expected margin keeps shrinking is the thing an underwriter looks for first — and it is only visible because every estimate the job has ever carried is still recorded.

Two numbers on every job are yours and nothing can work them out: what the contract is worth, change orders included, and what you now expect it to cost. The Figures button on a row is where they go. Re-enter the expected cost whenever it moves — every reading is kept, and the distance from your first one is profit fade, which is what an underwriter looks for first.

Closing a job takes it off the schedule above. Nothing is hidden or deleted — its costs stay exactly where they are, and a job that comes back (a snag, a retention release) can be reopened.

Billing, and what your customers are holding

A pay application you ISSUE. Every figure on it is to date, so only what moved since the last one reaches the ledger — and the retainage withheld from you is an asset, not a note on the schedule above. This records what was billed; what has been earned follows percentage of completion, which the schedule computes.

Who owes you, and who you owe

Pay applications by customer or by supplier, in the buckets a bank reads. Retainage sits in its own column and is not aged — it falls due on acceptance, so ageing it would report you as ninety days late on money nobody owes yet. Record what arrived and it comes off the oldest open application first.

The chart, for this client

Not a list everybody gets. An account is in use because of something this client actually holds, and the reason is given. Anything they will never need can be marked not applicable so it stops appearing — and an account with entries in it cannot be, because hiding a number is not the same as not having one.

Cost codes

The chart says which account a cost hits. A cost code says which part of the work it went into — and the two cannot be collapsed: paving is a land improvement over 15 years and foundation excavation is building over 39, so one phase takes two accounts. Codes belong to the firm, not to a project, because that is what makes two jobs comparable.

A development list is what an owner budgets — land, design, entitlement, site work, vertical, FF&E, financing, contingency. A trade list is what a general contractor budgets: the CSI divisions. Rename anything; a list you have edited is never overwritten.

What these statements are

Every statement says which rulebook it follows. Silence gets read as GAAP by anybody who did not ask, and this ledger carries tax depreciation.

Moving something between companies

Two moves look identical and are not. This is what each one does, and what it recomputes.

What has been posted

Newest first. A journal can be reversed but never edited — the correction is a new entry that says what it undoes, which is what makes last year's accounts still reproduce.

The proof behind an entry

Shared costs already split

And whether each one still matches the measures that justified it. A split that was right when it was set and has not moved in three years while the companies changed size is the one that looks deliberate and is not — which is exactly what gets reversed.

Months

Closing a month refuses new entries dated in it. It reopens, with a reason — a month that cannot be reopened is one somebody works around by dating the correction into the wrong one.

Who did what

Append-only. Nothing in here can be changed or removed, which is the point of having it.

Trust accounts

Money held for somebody else. In many states it must sit in a separate account, be reconciled three ways every month, and never be paid out beyond what is held for that person. Mixing it with the firm's own money is called commingling and it is what a licence is lost over.

The trust instrument

Three-way reconciliation

Three records have to agree: the bank statement, the ledger, and every beneficiary's balance added up. The third is kept as its own register rather than worked out from the ledger, because a figure derived from the ledger would agree with it by definition and the check would pass every month however wrong things were.

Owner statement

What was collected for an owner, what was paid out, and what is still held. It opens and closes on the register the reconciliation ties, so the figure an owner reads is the figure a regulator sees.

Three numbers that are not the same number. Tax capital is what Schedule K-1 item L asks for. The 704(b) book figure is the economic deal the partnership agreement follows. Outside basis is tax capital plus your share of the partnership's debt, and it is the one that decides whether a loss is deductible and whether taking money out is taxable. They diverge permanently and correctly when somebody contributes property worth more than it cost them.

The paperwork behind a movement

A purchase is one event with one price. A build is years of invoices — land, entitlement, architect, impact fees, site work, hard costs and construction interest — accumulating into a basis that does not start depreciating until the building is ready. Costs go in as they arrive and nothing depreciates until you set the placed-in-service date.

Contracts, change orders, permits and invoices can be uploaded here — choose which build they belong to — or inside a build, at the foot of it.

Every tenant, what they owe and whether it arrived. A rent schedule turns the lease into the dates money is due, so a month where it did not is something the books can raise rather than something somebody has to remember to look for.

The terms are read off the document and shown with the sentence each one came from, so you can check them without opening the PDF. Nothing is created until you say so.

Who owes you money

Aged from what each lease says was due, so nothing has to be invoiced first. A period counts as paid when a real deposit is matched against it.

The annual true-up

What the tenant actually owes for the running costs, against what they paid in estimates. Which accounts count as recoverable is a decision, not a guess — so it is made here, once, and the reconciliation reads it.

Paperwork the books imply and nobody wrote

One company lending another money is a loan whether or not anybody wrote it down — and an intercompany balance with no note behind it is the first thing an examiner asks about. These are the pairs where money has moved and no agreement exists.

Which costs are recoverable

The accounts a tenant can be asked to contribute towards. Getting this wrong in either direction is a bill somebody disputes.

CAM, taxes and insurance — three pools, not one

A tenant can recover all three, or only taxes and insurance with their CAM capped, or nothing at all — in the same building, at the same time. Each pool comes out of the ledger on its own, and where you have the real bill in your hand you can state it and see both figures.

When two documents are the same event

A bank line, an invoice and a receipt can all describe one payment. Matching them is what stops the same money being counted twice — and where the sources disagree, the disagreement is kept visible rather than averaged away.

What it learned from being corrected

Every correction is offered as a rule, so the same mistake is not made twice. A rule is narrow on purpose — it says one thing about one pair of names, not a policy.

How it decides

Which model is doing the matching. The answer to "why did it match that" starts with knowing which one is running.

All companies together

A “group” is just a set of your companies you want added up together. You can have several, for different purposes — the bank wants one set, the taxman another, and you probably think about a third. Money you moved between your own companies is taken back out, because the group as a whole neither owns nor owes it. If the two sides of a transfer disagree, it was only entered once.

Standard groups

Press “Add this group” on any card — you are shown exactly what would be in it, and what the test could not see, before anything is created. For each group we say who decides who is in it — the law, the accounting standard, a document somebody has to read, or the client — what it changes, and the mistake it exists to prevent. The ones that cannot apply to this client say why.

Who is in it, and how each one is treated

How much of a company you own decides how it counts. Own more than half and all its numbers are added in, with the share belonging to your co-owner shown separately. Own 20–50% and it appears as a single line instead — you have a big say but you do not control it, and half a building is not a building. Own less than 20% and nothing of it comes in at all. You can override any of this, because control does not always follow ownership — and if you do, say why. Taking somebody out sets an end date rather than deleting them, so last year’s accounts still come out the same.

Did the group change between two periods?

Ask before trusting a comparative. Nothing about two columns of numbers reveals that an entity joined, left, or changed treatment.

Bring a statement in

Bank accounts

Reconciled means every difference is named — not that the two numbers match.

Central finite Opt-In Autopilot, User-Dictated 1/2/3/4-Way Matching, Surprise Expense Thresholds & 4-Loop Self-Learning Control Center. Use open all / close all to expand or collapse all 6 sections, and use Select all / De-select all on any section or globally.

What needs you

Documents become proposed entries. Nothing posts until somebody agrees to it.

Send documents in

Connected team email auto-intake

Work out what the documents tell me

What books has learned from being corrected

Documents read

Every document this client has sent, and what the reader made of it — including the ones nothing could name. The pile shows what is still waiting to be posted; this shows everything, whether it became an entry or not.