Tools

Account breakdown

Paste raw GL or sub-ledger detail and get it organized by whatever dimension matters — customer, vendor, program, category — current against prior, sorted by what moved.

This is the pivot you build by hand every period. It takes a few minutes each time, it's the same few minutes every month, and under close pressure it's the step that gets skipped — which is how an account ends up technically reconciled and impossible to explain.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, nothing leaves your machine.

Start next period → move Current to Prior

What it does

Groups every row by its category, sums the amounts, puts the two periods side by side, and sorts by the size of the change — largest movement first, because that's where the explanation starts.

It also flags two things a flat transaction list hides:

• New — a category that appears this period and wasn't there last period.
• Gone — a category that was there last period and isn't now. This one is the most easily missed, because the absence of activity leaves no line to scan. A customer who stopped ordering, a vendor who stopped invoicing, a program that ended.

What it doesn't do

This compares two periods, not a trend across several. If you're trying to see how a category has built or drawn down over six or twelve months, run it each period and keep the outputs — it won't reconstruct that history for you in one pass. That's a genuinely different tool and it isn't this one.

It won't infer a category out of a free-text description. If your GL detail doesn't carry the dimension you want to group by, no tool can recover it after the fact — that's a question about how data flows into the ledger in the first place, and it gets fixed upstream rather than at close.

It also doesn't write the explanation. It gives you the organized picture so that writing the explanation takes minutes instead of starting from a flat list. Grading what you wrote is a separate step.

Where this helps most

Revenue and receivables are the obvious cases, and most people already pivot those. The accounts where this tends to go undone are the ones where the categorization is just as useful and nobody has time to build it — prepaid expenses by what they relate to, accrued liabilities by program or vendor, reserves by what they provision against.

Those are the accounts where a reviewer asks "what's actually in this balance," and the honest answer is usually that nobody has looked at it that way since the schedule was built.

Want this as a workbook you keep? The free flux template is the single-sheet version. The CloseOps Flux & Variance System ($79) starts from your trial balance instead: confirm each account's classification and it builds the income statement and balance sheet flux statements, then ranks what to investigate.

Related: balance sheet flux analysis, a worked example using this exact pivot, and the free Excel template.

Found something wrong or missing? Tell me here — anonymous, thirty seconds.