Deferred Revenue Tie-Out Check

The problem

Somebody looks at the deferred revenue balance and says it looks wrong. It usually is, and the reason is almost never exotic: a rounding remainder nobody allocated, a credit note recognised as income instead of reversing revenue, three months recognised on a contract that was cancelled in April, a schedule row for a contract that does not exist. Each one is small. Together they are why a close takes a week and an auditor asks for workings you do not have.

What it does

You give it the revenue schedule you already have — one CSV: contract, period, amount — and, if you have it, the contract file to tie back to. It runs a Python script over both and names what does not hold together.

• Does not tie — an obligation's schedule does not sum back to its contract amount, and by how much.
• Refund not reversed — the contract line is negative but the schedule still recognises income.
• Recognised before the term starts, after it ends, or after a cancellation.
• Orphan revenue and never-scheduled contracts — revenue with no contract behind it, and contracts with no revenue in front of them.
• Gaps, duplicated periods and currency drift inside a single obligation.
• Sub-cent amounts — what a float artefact looks like by the time it reaches a ledger.
• Input it refuses to guess at — 1,200.50 is rejected rather than interpreted, because the same glyphs mean a thousand-fold different number in another locale.

Where it stops, on purpose

It finds the problem. It does not invent the answer. No schedule is built here, no journal entries, no roll-forward, no standalone selling price allocation, no proration for a mid-term upgrade. If the answer to a finding is "so what should it be?", that is a rebuild — the schedule has to be regenerated from the contract terms and tied back period by period, not patched row by row, or next month drifts again. The skill says so rather than improvising an engine in prose.

It is equally plain about a clean run: no findings means the checks above did not fire on the file you supplied. It does not mean the schedule is right, and the tool prints that in those words every time it finds nothing, alongside a list of what it did not check.

Frameworks and tools

Python 3.9+ and the standard library. No network, no API keys, no third-party packages. Ships with a deliberately broken worked example — six contracts, twelve findings — so you can see the output before pointing it at your own books. A spotter, not an audit, and not accounting advice: the judgements and the sign-off stay with your accountant.