A ticked box is a record of your own confidence

I shipped four workbooks over the last two weeks. They all came out of the same argument, so I would rather make the argument than list the products.

A checklist records that you did something. A control proves it.

Here is the difference in practice. A close checklist has a line that says reconcile every bank account. You tick it. Six weeks later somebody asks whether the March books are good, and what you have is a ticked box. That box is a record of your own confidence at the time, and nothing more.

A control asks for the GL balance and the statement balance, computes the variance, compares it against a tolerance you set in advance, and writes Ties or VARIANCE. Now the ticked box means something, because the sheet would have said VARIANCE if it were not true.

That sounds like a small distinction. I think it is most of the difference between bookkeeping and controllership.

Labor burden. A checklist line that says cost labor correctly does nothing at all. A calculator that takes your actual workers comp rate, your state unemployment rate, your benefit cost per head, and the paid hours you cannot bill to a job, and returns $41.44 an hour against a $28 wage, is different. It is different again when that 48 percent is applied automatically to every labor row you post, because then you cannot forget to do it on a busy Friday.

Most contractors I have seen estimate at the wage and cost at the wage. Every job looks fine until the year closes.

Flux review. Review the P&L for anomalies is not a control. It is a hope with a deadline. Flagging any line that moves more than both $2,500 and 10 percent against last month, and refusing to call the month closed until somebody has written down why, is a control.

One detail there matters more than it looks: both tests have to trip. If you flag on dollars alone, a large account drifting two percent lights up every month. If you flag on percent alone, a small account tripling lights up every month. Either way you learn to ignore your own flags within a quarter, which is worse than having none.

The sign-off. This is the one I care about most. Every one of these workbooks ends in a sign-off whose conclusion is written by formula from what you actually completed, not by you at the end of a long day. If reconciliations are outstanding, or a flagged variance has no written explanation, or a reconstruction was loaded but never verified, the sign-off says so and names the reason. It will not produce a clean conclusion you have not earned.

I built it that way because the sign-off is the only part of this work that someone else reads and relies on.

Conversion Tie-Out and Sign-Off, $29. Twenty-six tie-out areas comparing a source file against a converted one, with an automatic Ties or VARIANCE status, an exceptions log, and a one-page sign-off.

Month-End Close System, $49. The five phases of a normal close with the controls on top. Reconciliations against a tolerance, a recurring entry register that flags anything due and not posted, the flux review above, a close scorecard, and a twelve-month trend.

Contractor Job Costing and WIP Schedule, $129. The labor burden calculator above, plus a percentage-of-completion WIP schedule with over and under billings, which QuickBooks has no native version of and which your bonding company will ask for.

Accounting Migration Control and First-Close Kit, $199. The big one. Thirty-five documented things the Desktop to Online converter drops or mangles, each routed by you; a thirty-four area tie-out; an import builder that stages the journal entries to put back what was destroyed, in IIF format for Desktop or a flat grid for Transaction Pro and SaasAnt; and a first close keyed to what the conversion broke rather than a generic one.

That makes thirteen workbooks in the catalog, and for the first time nothing is listed as coming soon. The whole list is at thepracticalcontroller.com/templates.

These are version 1.0. They are built carefully and the formulas are tested, but they have not been through hundreds of client files yet. If something behaves wrong, or a tie-out area I included does not matter in your work and one I left out does, tell me. I will fix it and send you the updated file.

I would rather hear that from you than find it out from a refund.

Jon