Case Study 2: Revenue Reconciliation & Contract Dispute Support
A subcontracted security services provider engaged me to reconcile billing, hourly labor records, and QuickBooks Online data related to their contract.
The client needed to determine:
Whether all hours worked were properly invoiced
Whether invoices had been fully paid
The total outstanding revenue owed
The Forensic Approach
The Challenge
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Client-provided spreadsheets reflected invoice discounts and fees as positive numbers instead of negatives, distorting running balances and overstating receivables.
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Invoices were not always issued in the same month work was performed, creating confusion when reconciling November vs. December revenue.
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Uncertainty existed regarding whether all actual on-site hours worked were being accurately invoiced to the clients.
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Revenue validation required complex alignment between internal job spreadsheets, hourly labor records, QuickBooks Online invoices/payments, payment emails, and expense vouchers.
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The client was negotiating contract termination and required highly defensible financial documentation to determine the exact amount truly owed.
The Solution
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Converted discounts to negative values, segmented transactions chronologically, and cross-referenced all fragmented data sources against QuickBooks Online to create a single source of truth.
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Imported quarterly records, calculated expected totals based on job rates, and cross-compared actual hours against issued invoices to ensure all labor was accounted for.
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Analyzed payment notifications and expense vouchers, successfully reconstructing invoice timing relative to actual work dates to resolve the month-to-month confusion.
The Results
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Discovered that November payments did not accurately reflect November labor, requiring a complete revenue recalculation to ensure accurate final billing.
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Successfully recalculated month-specific revenue exposure, providing the defensible documentation needed to verify $148,000 as the corrected amount due for November.
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Confirmed zero income collected for December and initiated per-client outstanding calculations to secure the remaining revenue prior to contract termination.