Taking your podcast to work has never been so fun! Come along for the typos that make you nuts, the mundane tasks we all hate but have to learn...and today, understanding why Credit Cards are often such an accounting Pain in the ASSets! Cash is King...so credit cards must be pawns...and indeed they are! Welcome to the continuation of my "take your podcast to work" special. Keep listening as tax season drudges on...what songs will I sing...what analogies will I come up, will I make it without going insane? Let's listen and learn along the way!
In this deep-dive episode, I take you along for a real-time forensic accounting case study, showing exactly how I unravel years of bookkeeping errors, missing transactions, and accounting discrepancies. This is “Take Your Podcast to Work Day”, where I bring you into my world as I hunt down over $100,000 in missing transactions across multiple years for a client.
The biggest lesson? Bank reconciliations aren’t just about checking off transactions in QuickBooks. They reveal financial truths, expose costly mistakes, and ultimately, can save businesses thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of dollars.
Key Takeaways:
✅ Your Credit Cards Are a Nightmare (If You Don’t Reconcile Them) – Credit cards are essentially bank accounts. If you’re making payments but not tracking individual transactions, you’re likely missing expenses and messing up your cash balance.
✅ Auto-Pay Doesn’t Mean Auto-Book – Recurring payments (utilities, loan payments, credit card payments) don’t automatically show up in QuickBooks unless you manually enter or link them. Forgetting to do so leads to massive discrepancies.
✅ Garbage In, Garbage Out – Relying blindly on QuickBooks “green check marks” without proper reconciliations can give you a false sense of financial security. The software is only as good as the data you put in.
✅ Bookkeepers Can Be the Problem, Not the Solution – This case revealed that the previous bookkeeper was charging the client every month but not actually reconciling accounts. That’s right—the bookkeeper’s own payment wasn’t even recorded properly.
✅ Bank Reconciliations Save You From Tax Nightmares – Untracked transactions mean missing deductions, leading to higher taxes. This client was unknowingly set up to overpay by tens of thousands of dollars—all because of sloppy bookkeeping.
If this episode made you rethink your bookkeeping game, it’s time to take action. Are your books accurate? Are you unknowingly leaving money on the table?
➡️ Listen to the full episode to hear how I untangled this financial disaster in real-time.
➡️ Head over to LearnWTF.com for practical toolkits, courses, and resources to keep your business finances in check.
Stop playing financial Russian roulette—start mastering your money today!
Listen along with your friendly neighborhood CPA, Katrina Keller, CPA, CFF, CFE, MST (PhD in progress)! ;)
