By Emmet R. Wood
Director, Audits and Investigations
The Real Estate Commission’s Audits and Investigations Division has discovered a major problem with some long-term rental management companies which utilize computer software to prepare their trust account books – cash receipts are not balanced to the deposit tickets and to the computer.
If you are the broker-in-charge of a real estate office, you are responsible for its daily cash reconciliation. The following example may help you with this:
1) Total the cash receipts and record the total on the last cash receipt.
2) Prepare the deposit ticket making sure the total of the handwritten cash receipts equals the total cash deposited into the bank.
3) Record the cash receipts to the computer, and print out a computer cash receipts report (the report may have another name depending on your software) making sure the total of the cash receipts equals the total on the deposit ticket and the computer cash receipts report.
4) Attach the computer cash receipts report (which is considered a supplemental deposit worksheet) to the deposit ticket and maintain it as part of the trust account
records.
This article came from the March 2004-Vol34-3 edition of the bulletin.