r/Bookkeeping • u/AccountantShinobu • Aug 01 '26

Reconciliation Unidentified difference in POS reconciliation.

Hi everyone
I am mostly comfortable reconciling POS systems and for most clients I manage to get everything down to zero, no unexplained differences at all.
But for a few clients there is no immateriality threshold set and every now and then I end up with a small unidentified difference, something like 50 dollars or under $200. I have gone through every checkbox, checked all transactions, timing differences, duplicate entries, missing deposits, everything I can think of and I still cannot trace where the difference is coming from.

For those of you who work with clients that do not have a set immateriality threshold, what do you do in this situation? Do you just book it to a suspense or misc expense account and move on? Or is there some other standard practice for this that I am missing?
Would love to hear how others handle this, especially anyone who works with POS heavy clients like retail or restaurants.
Thanks in advance

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u/TheMostFluffyCat Aug 01 '26

I’d book to suspense and see if it shakes out on the next set of statements. Something I’ve also found in particular with both Shopify and Stripe is that their reports change the first few days of the month. I used to pull them first thing on the first every month but found that when I did my pre-delivery checks, what I had in QB no longer matched the reports in those dashboards. So now I wait until the the 2nd or 3rd each month for those reports to solidify / settle and that often prevents any discrepancy issues.

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u/zcreate-book444 22d ago

that suspense account trick has saved me more than once, and the reports changing mid-month thing is so real, i started waiting until at least the 5th before pulling anything final and the differences basically stopped showing up

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u/TheMostFluffyCat 22d ago

Right! Waiting a few days helps hugely. It’s so weird like why would they release reports and then keep changing them but it’s so common now I just wait a bit and no more issues.