The owner: books current through the second quarter, with the CPA waiting on them
The client is a sports and athlete management company. Money moves constantly in a business like this. Compensation in and out, reimbursements & payments tied to players.
GATP keeps the books in QuickBooks Online.
Late in the year, the owner’s CPA started on year-end tax estimates. That brought up a familiar question. Are the books actually up to date?
They were current through the second quarter and no further.
The owner looped in the CPA, who opened the file and flagged the issue at once. This was not a missing transaction here or there. The books had drifted away from the bank.
Not one bank account had been reconciled since the prior year-end. One operating account sat negative on the balance sheet. No overdraft behind it, it had simply never been reconciled through the current period.
The undeposited funds account carried far more than it should. And a Player Compensation account had been set up as a bank account, when it was meant to offset revenue.
End of the day, the statements no longer described reality. The owner could not trust the P&L. The CPA could not estimate taxes on books nobody had tied out, and year-end was close.
With GATP: nine months brought current across every payment channel
The brief from the owner & the CPA was pretty clear. Bring the books current and reconcile them to the bank, against source documents. Nothing adjusted just to look right.
We treated it as one job. Get the books to agree with what actually happened, account by account.
So we started with the records. January through September went in against the bank and credit card statements, and the payment platforms the business uses, Venmo and PayPal included. Every channel was accounted for, beyond the traditional bank accounts.
Then each bank account was reconciled to its statement through September 30.
Once an account ties to the statement, the negative balance stops being a mystery. It becomes a number the bank agrees with.
The same work cleared the inflated Undeposited Funds. That holding account is where money sits on its way to the bank, and a bloated one is a classic sign of deposits recorded but never cleared.
Every account back in its right place, and no guessing on the rest
Two pieces of quieter work came next. Most owners never see this part, but it is what makes the financials honest.
First, Player Compensation. We stopped using it as a bank account, set up a contra revenue account and reclassified the activity. Revenue now reads correctly, with no phantom balance offsetting it.
Second, the uncategorized items. Rather than guess, we built a short list of the items only the owner and the CPA can explain. Then we asked for exactly those answers, so nothing sits unexplained.
Each step was sequenced to build on a verified one before it. That order is what separates catch-up bookkeeping from a quick tidy-up.
Books that tie to the bank, and a file the CPA can build on
The books now tie to the bank. The results are pretty clear:
- All bank accounts reconciled through September 30.
- January through September recorded across bank, card, Venmo and PayPal.
- Player Compensation moved from a bank account to a contra-revenue account.
- The negative balance and inflated Undeposited Funds resolved to bank-agreed numbers.
- A CPA-ready file, with only a short owner-specific list left to confirm.
GATP is now coordinating directly with the CPA on the open questions.
For the owner, “are my books up to date?” went from an open worry to a yes. A year of drift turned into a short list of questions.
By reconciling every account to its statement, Venmo and PayPal included, GATP helped a sports management company reach year-end with books its CPA can build tax estimates on.
LET’S TALK
If your books are current on paper but nobody has reconciled them to the bank in months, we can sort it out. Our bank reconciliation services work against real statements, Venmo and PayPal included, and hand your CPA a file they can check.
It is everyday work inside the outsourced bookkeeping services GATP runs, so year-end stops being a scramble.
Contact GATP to get your books tied back to the bank before year-end.
