Banking

This standard governs banking in the accounting system of All About Pawz, LLC: the bank accounts the business operates, the transactions that flow through them, the payouts that leave them, and the reconciliation that proves the books and the bank statements agree. Every other standard in this section records what should have happened; banking proves what did. The Accounting Operator prepares reconciliations and works payout records; the Accounting Manager approves each reconciliation, and: under the separation of duties stated below: never reconciles an account whose payments the manager recorded.

Bank accounts

Each bank account record carries the institution, the account name, the account type, the currency, and the opening balance with its date.

1. The opening balance is the anchor every reconciliation starts from. The operator verifies it against the actual statement on the day the account is set up; an opening balance wrong by a dollar leaves every later reconciliation wrong by a dollar.
2. An account may be marked as the default payout account and as the primary account. Only accounts marked reconcilable enter the reconciliation procedure, so that a petty-cash holding is never drawn into a bank reconciliation.

Banking credentials are never shared between operators, never recorded in an account record, a memo, or any other document, and never sent by email or message. Access is individual, and a change of role or a departure ends it the same day, under Admin Users.

The connected processor accounts are the other half of banking: for each tenant, which connected account belongs to it, whether charging and payouts are enabled, and whether onboarding is complete. The business and every franchise tenant link their own bank through the processor's onboarding; bank details are collected and held by the processor and are never typed into or stored in the Platform. Where a tenant cannot receive payouts, the operator checks the onboarding flags first, under Payments (Accounting Payments).

Bank transactions

The bank transaction record is the statement side of the reconciliation: date, description, amount, type (deposit, withdrawal, transfer, fee, interest), whether it has been matched, and the books entry it matched to. Bank transactions are facts from the bank; journal entries are facts from the books. Reconciliation is the act of proving they describe the same events.

A fee or interest line from the bank requires its own journal entry: the bank charged a monthly fee, and the books shall show it. No operational event in the Platform creates these entries, so they are easy to forget. The month-end close includes a standing step: review the bank's fee and interest lines and post each one.

Reconciliation

The reconcile action compares the books balance for an account against the statement balance for a period, computes outstanding deposits and outstanding payments, and derives the adjusted balance. It records the reconciliation as complete only when the statement-minus-books difference is exactly zero: not approximately zero, and never by means of an invented balancing entry. A one-cent difference is an unreconciled period.

The operator works a difference in this order

1. Outstanding items: deposits recorded in the books but not yet on the statement, and payments recorded but not yet cleared. These are timing differences, and the reconciliation arithmetic accounts for them.
2. Bank-only items: fees, interest, and automatic charges the books never saw. Post them, then run the reconciliation again.
3. Book-only items: a journal entry with no real-world counterpart, such as a refund recorded through the administrative action whose processor transfer failed. Reverse or correct it under Books.
4. Wrong-account postings: the known hazard: a shop sale posts to checking, but the refund action credits cash. A refund on a card sale leaves the books' checking balance wrong by the refund amount while the bank is right. Move the refund entry to checking by correcting entry.

Reconcile monthly at minimum, and weekly for the operating account. A reconciliation three months behind is archaeology, not accounting.

Payouts

Payout records track money leaving the business: Seller payouts, staff payouts, vendor payouts, refunds, and transfers: each with its type, amount, destination, scheduled and processed dates, and the processor payout or transfer identifier tying it back to the processor. The Seller payout record adds the period, gross sales, fees, refunds, adjustments, and net amount, and records any transfer reversal and its amount against the payout it came from, so a dispute clawback is traceable to the payout it reduced; see Refunds and Disputes.

1. Seller payouts settle on a 7–14 day rolling delay, under Payments (Accounting Payments). Payout states: scheduled, processing, paid, failed, cancelled: show where each payout stands in that window.
2. A payout whose state has not moved past its scheduled date is investigated at the processor, not in the books: the books record only what happened.
3. Failed payouts are the urgent ones: wrong bank details, a closed account, a capability freeze during a dispute investigation. The destination and the failure reason are on the record. The operator corrects the cause and then re-issues; a failed record is never edited into a success.
4. "Paid" means the processor accepted the instruction; the money then travels on the processor's timeline. Where a Seller reports a paid payout never arrived, the operator checks the payout identifier in the processor's console before treating the Platform as having failed.

The payout-account discipline

Each tenant's default payout account is where its Seller payouts land. Confirming the payout account is part of a franchise tenant's go-live checks: a tenant with charges enabled and no payout account set is collecting money with nowhere for it to go. The Platform never routes one tenant's payouts through another tenant's bank account; payout records are kept per tenant precisely so that cannot happen by accident. If two tenants' payouts ever appear mixed, that is a defect in the payout run, not an operator error: the operator stops the run and escalates the same day, and does not attempt to repair it by editing payout records.

Failure modes

1. Reconciliation out by a round number. A missing entry, not a typing error. Round-number differences are whole transactions; search for an unposted refund, an unposted fee, or a duplicate entry before hunting for keying errors.
2. Reconciliation out by a small amount. Usually bank-only fees or interest the books missed, or the known cash-and-checking refund-account mismatch. Post the missing items; never force the difference.
3. Payout marked paid, Seller reports nothing arrived. See the payout procedure above: check the processor first.

Controls

• Separation of duties: the person who records a payment does not reconcile it. The operator who prepares a reconciliation is not the operator who recorded the payments in the period reconciled, and the Accounting Manager approves the completed reconciliation.
• No reconciliation is completed with a difference, and no balancing entry is ever posted to make a reconciliation agree. A difference is worked until its cause is found and recorded.
• Banking credentials are never shared and never recorded in a document, a record, or a message; see the bank accounts procedure above.
• A closed period is never altered. A banking correction belonging to a closed period is posted as a reversing or correcting entry in the open period, under Books.

Records created and where they are kept

Bank account records, bank transaction records, reconciliation records, and payout records are kept in the accounting system. Reconciliations and the statements they were proved against are retained under the Regulatory Record Retention Policy.

Escalation

A reconciliation difference that survives the procedure above, mixed payouts between tenants, or a suspected unauthorized banking change goes to the Accounting Manager the same day. Suspected fraud and any legal process touching a bank account go to legal@aapawz.com on the day they arise. Processor or connection failures go to support@aapawz.com.

Review cadence

Reconciliation is monthly at minimum and weekly for the operating account. The Accounting Manager reviews failed payouts weekly, reviews banking access quarterly under Admin Users, and reviews this standard annually.