Controls
Financial Reporting & Controls
Write-ups on financial reporting, controls, and the mental models I use when closing books and reading numbers.
Accounting Fundamentals: The Ground Floor of Record-to-Report
2026-10-10
Section 1 of a Record-to-Report curriculum worked end to end under Ind AS: the accounting equation and how accounts are classified, the core concepts from going concern to policies, estimates and errors, and how the five financial statements tie together in one running example.
Introduction to Accounting
2026-10-07
Class 11, Chapter 1, read at company level: the textbook frames accounting around a single-owner shop, so I went through it section by section and asked what each idea actually looks like inside a company's finance team, and whether it still holds.
Balance Sheet Reconciliations in Practice
2026-10-05
A practitioner walkthrough of Sections 6.1 to 6.10 of a Record-to-Report handbook: the shared five-step methodology, then bank, AR, AP, fixed assets, inventory, payroll, tax, intercompany, and suspense reconciliations, each with the usual causes of differences, worked examples, and the journal entries that resolve them.
What Record-to-Report Actually Does
2026-09-20
Three years inside RTR closes, accruals, intercompany, consolidation, and I'd stopped asking what any of it was actually for. Working back through a finance-operations handbook concept by concept surfaced one question that organized almost everything: for any number in the GL, did it come from an upstream transaction, or did RTR originate it out of its own policy and judgment?
Core Close Activities: Part 4
2026-09-08
The last four items on the fourteen-item checklist: intercompany elimination and transfer pricing, FX and hedge accounting, why manual journal entries carry the highest risk in a close, and how post-close adjustments split into estimate changes, immaterial errors, and material ones.
Core Close Activities: Part 3
2026-08-31
Payroll's statutory machinery, tax provisions and deferred tax, revenue and inventory recognition, and debt and equity reclassification, ten of the fourteen close checklist items now covered, with the same cumulative catch-up mechanic showing up under different names throughout.
Core Close Activities: Part 2
2026-08-27
Picking up from Part 1: prepaids as the mirror image of accruals, and fixed assets, what belongs in an asset's cost, how depreciation methods differ, and what changes when an estimate turns out to have been wrong.
Core Close Activities: Part 1
2026-08-22
The first three items on the core close checklist, close calendar and ownership, cut-off procedures, and accruals, and why the order and evidence behind each one matters more than the checklist itself.
Lease Accounting — ASC 842 vs IFRS 16
2026-08-21
A ten-step walkthrough of lease accounting, from identifying a lease to where ASC 842 and IFRS 16 genuinely diverge, asked from one question each time: who controls what, and how does that translate into a number.
Revenue Recognition: ASC 606 vs IFRS 15
2026-08-18
ASC 606 and IFRS 15 share an identical five-step model for revenue recognition. Tracing exactly where a decade of joint drafting between the FASB and the IASB still left room to disagree.