Your month-end figures

1 · Adjusted bank balance Bank statement ending balance, plus deposits in transit, minus outstanding checks.

2 · Trust ledger / book balance The cash balance your PMS shows for this trust bank account.

3 · Sum of all owner + tenant balances Total liability: every owner balance plus every tenant prepayment and security deposit held in this account.

What this checks — and what it doesn't

A three-way reconciliation requires all three figures above to be equal to the penny. This tool tells you whether they agree and which leg is out. That is genuinely useful: most property managers never compute leg 3 at all, and it is the leg that reveals a trust shortage.

What it can't tell you is why. A $2,140.00 gap could be one voided check, four wrong-property receipts, or a bulk transfer done at the bank. Finding the cause means matching every transaction on both sides and re-deriving every owner balance — that's the work our engine does in the free full audit, which returns record IDs and correcting entries within 48 hours.

If you're out of balance, check these first

A void in a closed period. A receipt or check that cleared and was reconciled, then voided later. The difference is constant every month — this is the single most common cause. How to locate it →
Bank-side transfers with no register entry. Owner distributions or fee sweeps done in online banking that were never recorded in the PMS.
Receipts posted to the wrong property. These reconcile perfectly against the bank (leg 1 = leg 2) while corrupting leg 3. Only the three-way check catches them.
Stranded clearing accounts. Security-deposit or undeposited-funds accounts left non-zero after a move-out or a deposit that never posted.
Migration-era opening balances. If the error predates your current software, every month since has reconciled against a wrong starting number.

Why the third leg matters most

In California's FY 2023-24 audit cycle, 57% of audited brokerages had trust recordkeeping violations and 32% had actual trust shortages totalling $3.5M. (CA DRE Bulletin, Oct 2024.) A shortage means liability exceeded cash — leg 3 above leg 1. Software reconciliation compares legs 1 and 2 only, which is why a company can be "reconciled" in its PMS every month and still be cited.

Related resources

Get a free trust account audit

Send three exports. Within 48 hours you get a discrepancy report — every finding tied to a record ID. No call required, no software to install.

Start your free audit now →

Ready in ~10 minutes of your time: answer four questions, upload your exports, get a tracking link. Report within 48 hours.

Typically for companies managing 100–3,000 doors on Buildium or AppFolio.