Check an owner-ledger export before three-way reconciliation

Before using an owner-ledger export in a three-way reconciliation, prove that it includes every balance belonging to the account being reviewed. Confirm the account, cutoff date, report filters and ledger population. A correct sum of an incomplete file is still an incomplete reconciliation.

This is an operational report-quality check for property-management firms. The responsible manager and advisers determine which beneficiary ledgers belong in the reconciliation and which rules apply to the business.

Define the population before exporting

Write down the bank account and the corresponding trust-book control account. Identify which owner, property, resident or other beneficiary records explain that balance in your system. Avoid assuming that an owner statement alone includes all funds held for others.

Then record the report name, as-of date, accounting basis where selectable, entity or portfolio filters, and any active-only or nonzero-only setting. Buildium’s reporting documentation illustrates why export settings matter: reports can be configured before download. Check the options available in your current software rather than relying on a previously saved layout.

Save an untouched export and a separate working copy. The working copy can add review columns; the source file should remain available to explain what the software actually returned.

Run four completeness checks

1. Scope: Does every included ledger belong to this account and entity? Investigate ledgers assigned to multiple accounts instead of counting their entire balances twice.
2. Population: Compare the export with the account’s expected ledger list. Explain new, removed and inactive records.
3. Structure: Confirm that detail rows are numeric, all rows were exported, and subtotals have not been summed together with their underlying detail.
4. Control total: Recalculate the detail total and compare it with the report’s displayed total and the intended book balance.

An inactive owner may still have an unresolved balance. A zero-balance ledger may matter to your completeness check even though it adds nothing to the sum. Keep negative balances visible for review rather than filtering them out to make the presentation cleaner.

Worked example: the total agrees but two ledgers are missing

Illustrative example. A firm’s account-mapped ledger list contains 42 records. An export has 40 detail records totaling $84,250, exactly matching the trust-book control balance. At first glance, the third side of the reconciliation appears complete.

The missing records are an inactive ledger with a $1,100 balance and a second ledger with a negative $1,100 balance. Their net effect is zero. Adding them does not change $84,250, but omitting them hides two balances that require review.

A matching aggregate establishes only that the totals agree. It does not establish that each owner’s balance is correct or that every record has been included. Investigate the two balances through their transaction histories; do not net them together as a correction.

Build a repeatable export cover sheet

Use fields for report filename, software report name, export time, cutoff date, account mapping, filters, detail-row count, recalculated total, software total, expected ledger count, exceptions and reviewer. Record why an excluded ledger does not belong in the account’s population.

When the software reports by property and the review schedule reports by owner, retain the mapping between them. A property owned jointly can create duplicate totals if someone repeats the whole property balance for each owner. Agree on the unit of detail before combining files.

What happens after the export passes?

Use it with the adjusted bank balance and the matching trust-book balance in the three-balance comparison. Carry unresolved ledger issues into the reconciliation exception log, even if the three totals agree.

DaxSync’s property-management services can include defining the report population and documenting the recurring export handoff. The objective is a reconciliation another reviewer can reproduce from the retained records.