Three choices that are still real
By October you can see the shape of the year without pretending December is already here. Three choices usually matter. What you pay yourself from the company that has the cash. Whether a purchase belongs in this year or the next. Which month you close on purpose so the last two months are not the first time the numbers are honest. None of those is a trick. All of them need books that are at least mostly caught up.
If the books are six months behind, October is a catch up, and we say that plainly so the work starts there. If the books are current through August, October is exactly the conversation. You can still move. You cannot invent a year you did not live.
Write down three lines before the call if you can. What you have already paid yourself. The purchase you are considering. The last month that actually ties. Those three lines tell us whether October is a decision or a catch up, and they keep the conversation on your year. A choice you name in October can still be lived in November. A choice you only discover in April can only be written down after the fact.
October on the calendar is a month you can still mark, and we sit with that page the same week you do. A pen on the twentieth does not close the month by itself. The statements still have to separate a public day from a wholesale week, and the month still has to tie to its own bank before the mark means anything. We do not blend two companies just because they share the same October.
Pay yourself with the months in view
What you take out of the company should match how that company is taxed and how much cash it actually has. A number picked in January and never looked at again is how people get surprised. October is a good time to look, because there is still a payday or two, or a distribution window, depending on the company. We put the year-to-date next to the cash and say what is left to decide. You decide. The page does not decide for you.
A second company with its own cash does not automatically fund the first. If you move money to make payroll, that transfer has to be cleared on both sides before the October reading is trustworthy. Otherwise you are paying yourself with a number that will move as soon as the transfer is named.
After October the window narrows
November can still hold a purchase and a planned close. December mostly records what you already chose. A choice pushed past December can only be written down after the fact. That is why this page exists as its own page, not as a footnote on the return. The return is the record. October is the decision. Naming the month that still needs a close is part of that October decision, and we write it down with you.
Adair's Saloon in Deep Ellum is the burger and live-music room with the walls covered in memorabilia, and we go for a Friday there the way you do. If your company sells into nights like that, we do not average October Fridays into October Tuesdays when we are deciding what the year still needs. We use the deposits.
