Donation intake and audit evidence

Reconcile a bounded period, and leave a record that still reads twelve months later

• Domain: Audit & Compliance
• Moment: Before you sign
• Customer: A national humanitarian organisation receiving donations through several channels

Reconcile the period and keep a file an auditor can follow.

The situation

Donations arrive as electronic payins, bank credits and cheques, across channels and campaigns. The records describing them sit apart: payins in one place, the bank statement in another, the cheque log in a third, and the bank master data that ties an account to an entity in a fourth.

Finance ties them together for the period. Months later an auditor asks about one item, and the tie-out has to be built a second time.

What breaks today

The four sources never meet. Each is maintained separately, so the match is assembled by hand each period and cannot be repeated by anyone else.

Unmatched means unmatched. The item appears on a list with no reason attached. Whether it is a timing difference, a duplicate payin, a cheque not yet cleared or a receipt against a closed campaign sits with whoever looked at it.

The evidence does not survive the period. Working files are overwritten and links to source records break, so the version that supported the signed figure is not the version on the drive.

Limitations go unstated. A reconciliation covers what was available on the day it ran, and what was excluded is rarely written down.

What Manuel does

It reconciles a fixed snapshot. A defined period uses a fixed extract from each source. The same inputs produce the same result for later review.

It names the residual. Rules check the reference first, then account, amount, and date within an agreed window, followed by cheque timing across periods. Remaining items carry a reason.

It separates three things in the output. Summary is what the numbers were. Evidence is the item-level record of what matched against what. Limitations state what the run did not cover and which source was incomplete on the day.

It produces a static, offline, printable file. The file can be stored, sent to an auditor, and read without a network connection.

What the customer gets

This engagement is at an early stage. No product result has been delivered or measured yet.

The control gives each unmatched line a reason and creates a document that a later reviewer can follow. Discovery measures its effect on period-end work and audit queries.

What stays with your existing systems

The donation and payin systems stay the record of what was received. The accounting ledger stays the book of record. Manuel reads extracts and produces a document. It does not become a second donor master or another system to log into.

What a first scope looks like

One period, one channel, one set of extracts, read-only, with nothing connected to production.

We reconcile a period that is already closed and put the report next to the working file that supported the signed figure.

Related: Pre-reconciliation detection / Cash-in-bank reconciliation at scale / Continuous audit