Joining one client across the ledger and the tax file
One client exists as a legal entity name in CCH Axcess, as a trading name in QuickBooks Online, as an abbreviation in the practice management record, and as whatever a receptionist typed into the portal. The key that would settle it is the EIN, which is often blank in the ledger and wrong by one transposed digit in the portal. A crosswalk is built from normalised names and the EIN where it exists, then holds one identifier per client that every later automation reads instead of guessing. Renamed entities and mid year mergers break the map, so it gets rebuilt rather than trusted.
Everything is finished and the return still cannot be filed, because the signature authorisation has not come back.
The trial balance is the centre of this work, and most of the repeated labour is getting source material into a shape the trial balance can accept. Statements arrive as PDFs, receipts arrive as photographs, and bank data arrives through an aggregator that authenticates against a bank which changes its login flow without notice.
- CCH Axcess
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
- Excel
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the practice is small enough that one person carries every client mapping in their head and nobody else touches the same file. The crosswalk pays for itself when several people work the same client in different systems. Below that it is a table somebody has to maintain.
The constraint that shapes it
Tax return information is governed by a statute that makes disclosure or use outside preparation a criminal matter, with a parallel civil penalty, and consent has to be obtained in a prescribed form naming the recipient and the purpose. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Widening a conflicts search past exact spelling
- Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
- How do I match the same client between QuickBooks Online and CCH Axcess?
- Why does the client name differ between the ledger and the tax return?
- Can I use an EIN to link client records across accounting systems?
- What breaks when a client changes its legal name mid year?
- How do accountants keep one client list across four different systems?
Back to accounting and bookkeeping, or see how this is priced and scoped.