Books Cleanup for Small BusinessSales are not the deposit
Both numbers can be true on the same day. Treating the deposit as the sales total misstates both.
Compare one week.
A fee, a transfer, or both.
A card processor keeps a fee, so the amount that lands is smaller than the sale you rang. A deposit can also contain a transfer from your own other account, a refund coming back, or a processor reserve releasing. None of those is a sale, and none of them should be forced into the sales total to make the bank look explained.
The practical test is one week. Put the settlement beside the sales for that week and name the difference in words, not in a plug. Fee. Transfer. Reserve. Real sale that has not settled yet. Once those words exist, the return has something it can stand on.
Why this page refuses a trade costume.
A dining room and a salon both meet this arithmetic, and so does a solo practice that invoices by the job. This page does not borrow their tax rules. It keeps the small-business version, which is just the two numbers and the words between them.
A receipt on the counter and the deposit that lands three days later are both real money. They are still two measurements. The sale happened when the customer paid. The deposit happened when the processor released the cash. Treating those two moments as one number is how a clean week starts to lie.
A reserve is a third number.
A processor sometimes holds a reserve and releases it weeks later. That release is neither a new sale nor the fee from the week it lands. If you call it either one, the week you actually sold the work gets the wrong total and the later week gets a ghost.
Name the reserve when it is held, and name it again when it comes back. The two notes are the whole explanation. No plug is required, and no one has to force the bank deposit to equal the sales ticket.
Send one settlement
One week of sales beside one settlement is enough.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.