The Numbers Changed...I Must Be in New Territory

The Numbers Changed? I Guess I’m in New Territory Now.

The Numbers Changed...I Must Be in New TerritoryYesterday I worked on pulling data for an invoice and as usual, I double checked prior months’ numbers. Why do that? They are not supposed to change. Well, in a public company, prior months’ numbers are supposed to remain the same. If you change them, then that’s called restating the financials and that’s frowned upon. It could get you in big trouble.

But I’m in a different world now. It was not the company that I work for that was changing the numbers but the client. This client may be privately owned so the financial close rules may not be as rigid. So, every month I have to double check the prior months’ data to make sure I incorporate the latest changes, because so far, EVERY month has undergone some kind of “correction”.

The finance professionals in my company really don’t like these retroactive changes but will do them only under strict conditions. An example was given of re-opening the books once a year to restate the numbers to match audit findings. That sounds like a perfect legitimate reason for a private company to do: do it once a year to fix issues brought up during an audit.

The client change every month though. That is going to take some getting used to.

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