Reconciling means checking that what the app says happened matches what actually happened to the money. Do it monthly and it takes fifteen minutes. Skip it for a season and you will be untangling it in the winter with no memory of the jobs.
1 Start with the summary tiles
Open Transactions. Four tiles sit above the ledger:
- Charged, everything billed in the filtered period
- Collected, everything taken in
- Net balance, the gap
- Tips (owe workers), kept out of the revenue figures on purpose
Set a date range for the month you are closing and read those four numbers first. Net balance is your accounts receivable for the period: it is what customers still owe you.
2 Reconcile collected against your bank
Collected should tie back to money that actually reached you, allowing for timing. It will not match your bank statement exactly, and the reasons are legitimate:
- Card payments taken near the end of the month are still pending and have not been paid out. See when your money arrives.
- Stripe processing fees come off before payout, so a payout is smaller than the payments inside it.
- Cash and cheques land on your own schedule, not Stripe’s.
Do not chase a penny-perfect match against your bank. What you are looking for is whether the shape is right and whether anything large is unexplained.
3 Work through the transaction types
Filter by type one at a time. Each type answers a different question:
| Filter | What you are checking |
|---|---|
| invoice | Did everything you did get billed? |
| payment | Is anything recorded that never actually arrived? |
| refund | Are all refunds ones you meant to issue? |
| credit | Do outstanding credits still make sense? |
| adjustment | Can you explain every single one? |
| tip | Does this match what you have paid the crew? |
Adjustments deserve the most attention. They are the type most likely to be someone patching a number by hand, and an adjustment nobody can explain is usually a symptom of a process problem rather than a one-off.
4 The four mismatches worth hunting
These are the ones that actually cost money:
- Completed jobs with no invoice. Work you did and never billed. Compare the month’s completed jobs against the invoice rows. This is the single most expensive gap in a lawn business.
- Customers in credit you did not know about. Filter to one customer and look for CR on the balance. You may owe them a visit or a refund, and they will eventually notice.
- Payments recorded but never received. Someone marks an invoice paid expecting a cheque that never comes. The invoice looks settled and the money never arrives.
- Tips not paid out. The Tips (owe workers) tile is a liability. If it keeps growing you are sitting on your crew’s money.
5 Per-customer, per-property
For a disputed account, filter to that single customer and read the Balance column down the page in date order. The running balance tells the story in sequence, which settles most arguments in a minute.
If one customer has several addresses, filter by property too. That separates “the customer owes me money” from “one particular site is the problem”, which are different conversations.
A monthly routine
- Set the date range to last month.
- Read the four tiles and write the net balance down somewhere.
- Filter to adjustments and explain each one.
- Check for completed jobs with no invoice.
- Check the tips tile against what you have actually paid out.
Fifteen minutes, once a month. It is the cheapest insurance in the business.