Handing out suspense cases
Money arrives that nobody can place. A payment reference nobody recognises, a transfer from an account you have never seen, a duplicate. The bank statement says it is yours, so the ledger books it the day it lands — into suspense, where it waits.
Waiting is not the same as being ignored. Every parked receipt opens a case: a piece of work with an owner, an age and somewhere to write down what you found out. The case is how unidentified money stops being a monthly surprise and starts being a queue somebody is working.
What a case already knows
You do not create a case. Parking the money creates it, carrying everything the bank sent:
- who the bank says paid — the counterparty name on the statement line;
- what they wrote on it — remittance information, and their own account number where the format carries one;
- when the money arrived — the value date, not the day anybody noticed;
- which of your bank accounts took it, and therefore which operating entity the case belongs to. Nobody is asked to choose. The money arrived in one entity’s bank account, so it is that entity’s case.
The age you see is counted from the day the money reached the bank. Not from the day the case was opened, and not from the last time anybody touched it — a receipt that sat unnoticed for three weeks shows three weeks old.
Handing work out
Open Suspense from the operating entity, or the cross-entity worklist if you supervise more than one.
Cases arrive unowned. To give them out:
- Filter to what you want to hand over — a purpose, an age band, or just everything unassigned.
- Select the rows. The overnight batch is usually the whole of the top of the list.
- Choose Assign, and pick the clerk.
All of them move together. If any case in your selection cannot be assigned — somebody resolved it while you were looking at the list — none of them are. You get told which, and you can re-select and go again. This is deliberate: being told “thirty-one of forty assigned” leaves you working out which nine, from a list that has since moved.
Assigning again replaces the owner. There is no unassign step — hand it to somebody else, or to yourself.
Finding your own work
Filter the worklist by owner. A clerk sees the cases handed to them, oldest first, which is the order they should be worked in.
What a case cannot do
A case cannot be marked resolved. You can move it through Investigating and Awaiting information as you chase the payer, but resolved is not a status anybody sets — it happens when the money is placed, and only then. A case whose money is still sitting in suspense stays open however finished it feels.
That is the point of the separation. The case is the work; the money is the money. If they could disagree, the aged suspense report and the general ledger would drift apart, and the first person to notice would be an auditor.
Working the case
Notes, files and follow-up tasks all attach to a case exactly as they do to an account or a counterparty — the same panels, in the same places. A call to the payer, the email they sent back, a reminder to chase again on Friday.
Placing the money is a separate step; see the suspense panel on the operating entity for allocation, refund, write-off and moving an item between purposes.