Accounting Dashboard

This standard governs the Accounting Dashboard, the read-only summary the Accounting Operator uses to start each working day in the accounting system of All About Pawz, LLC. The dashboard moves no money and edits no record. It answers one question: what needs attention right now: across receivables, cash, payables, payouts, and exceptions, and every figure on it leads to the underlying record where the work is done. The Accounting Manager reviews the dashboard weekly and owns the month-end close that the dashboard supports.

The five blocks

1. Outstanding receivables. Every unpaid invoice, aged by due date: current, 30 days late, and older. The aging is the substance of the block; a receivables total without aging states nothing useful. One large invoice long past due is a collections problem; many small current invoices are ordinary business.
2. Cash position. Money that has arrived, stated separately from money that is only promised. A payment recorded as succeeded is cash. A payment in pending is not cash, and the two are never combined into one figure.
3. Payables due. What the Company owes, to whom, and when it is due. A vendor payment is never first discovered to be late from the vendor.
4. Payouts in flight. What is scheduled to leave and what has arrived. Seller payouts settle on a 7–14 day rolling delay; a payout whose state has not moved past its scheduled date is investigated at the payment processor, not in the books, because the books record only what happened. Seller payout obligations are governed by Payments (Accounting Payments).
5. Exceptions. Failed payments, unapplied deposits, unreconciled bank items, and refunds awaiting approval. The other four blocks are information; the exceptions block is work.

Start-of-day routine

The Accounting Operator works the dashboard in this order each working day

1. Check the cash position first. Confirm that the previous day's card payments settled, and that no payment remains in pending longer than the processor's normal authorization window.
2. Resolve every stale pending payment. A payment stuck in pending is either a failed capture to retry or a customer to contact; pending is a state to resolve, not a state to monitor.
3. Scan receivables. Send a reminder from the invoice screen for every past-due invoice, following Invoices. Before the first reminder on any invoice, verify the billing contact; a reminder sent to an address that receives nothing is not a contact, whatever the reminder count on the record says.
4. Treat repeated reminders without payment as a collections decision, not a reminder problem, and refer the invoice to the Accounting Manager.
5. Review payouts in flight for any payout past its scheduled date.
6. Work the exceptions block from top to bottom until it is clear or every item carries a named next step.

Reading the blocks together

1. Compare cash position with payouts in flight before relying on either: a payout schedule built on pending payments is a shortfall waiting to happen.
2. Compare receivables aging with the exceptions block: an overdue invoice with no recent reminder is not being worked, whatever the receivables total says.
3. Compare payables due with cash position weekly: what must go out against what has actually come in is the weekly solvency check.

Controls

• The dashboard is read-only. Every correction is made on the record's own screen: the invoice, the payment, the refund: so that every correction leaves its own record of who acted and when.
• No operator acts on a dashboard total without opening the underlying records. A total that appears sound can conceal one large invoice masking many small overdue ones; the composition is where the problems are.
• The month-to-date revenue figure on the dashboard is directional only. The authoritative figures are the Profit & Loss and the Trial Balance in Reports, which read posted journal entries only. Where the dashboard and a report disagree, the report governs, and the usual cause is unposted activity, addressed in Troubleshooting (Accounting Troubleshooting).
• Separation of duties applies to everything the dashboard surfaces: the person who records a payment does not reconcile it. Reconciliation is governed by Banking.

Records created and where they are kept

Use of the dashboard creates no records. The records it reads: invoices, payments, refunds, deposits, payouts, bank accounts, and payables: are created and kept in their own parts of the accounting system under Invoices, Payments (Accounting Payments), Deposits, and Purchases, and are retained under the Regulatory Record Retention Policy.

Escalation

Operational problems the operator cannot resolve: a payment the processor shows captured with no Platform record, an exception that recurs after correction: go to support@aapawz.com. Legal process, including any demand or notice touching a receivable or a payout, goes to legal@aapawz.com on the day it is received.

Review cadence

The Accounting Operator works the dashboard daily. The Accounting Manager reviews the exceptions pattern weekly, and reviews this standard whenever a new exception type is added to the dashboard or a recurring exception shows the routine is missing a class of problem.