Reconcile before you hand off
Filing season goes smoothly when the records are reconciled before they reach your accountant. The servicing work is preparing clean data — not preparing the return. Hand over a frozen, footed package and the return is built on facts, not estimates. You end up paying your accountant for tax judgment instead of for hours spent chasing figures that should have tied months ago.
The difference shows up in March. A book that was reconciled and locked each month needs only a year-end roll-up; a book that drifted all year has to be rebuilt under a filing deadline, which is exactly when rushed assumptions and transcription errors creep in.
A useful year-end handoff commonly includes
Your accountant does not need access to your whole system — a defensible summary of what happened is usually enough. A useful year-end handoff commonly includes interest earned and received by loan and by investor, capital contributed and returned, every fee and adjustment with a reason attached, and a general ledger that ties to a trial balance for the year. Confirm the exact package your accountant wants — requirements vary by entity and filing. Deliver those and the return has a clean foundation; leave gaps and the questions come back to you mid-filing.
The checklist
Work these in order. Each line is done only when its condition actually holds — a half-reconciled item is worse than an open one, because it looks finished.
Interest earned vs. received, per loan
Done whenAccrued and cash interest tie for every loan in the book.
Investor interest & capital activity
Done whenEach investor's YTD interest foots to the monthly detail behind it.
Fees, waivers, and adjustments
Done whenEvery ledger line has a documented reason someone can explain.
General ledger ↔ trial balance
Done whenThe two agree for the full year, not just the last month.
Freeze & export
Done whenCSV/XLSX pulled from the locked, frozen year — not a live file.
A quick foot-check
Before you export, confirm each investor's annual interest equals the sum of their monthly figures. Lumen's $8,530.27 YTD interest should equal the year-to-date monthly figures behind it — if it is not, the break is in the book, and you want to find it now, not in April. The same check applies to the borrower side: for a fully allocated loan, over the same period and on the same accrual basis, gross borrower interest should reconcile to investor interest plus the contractual servicing spread, subject to documented rounding and effective-dated capital or rate changes. Two foot-checks catch most of what an accountant would otherwise catch for you at a higher hourly rate.
Freeze before you send
Once the year reconciles, lock it. A year-end figure that can still move is a draft, and a draft handed to an accountant becomes a moving target the moment someone edits a prior month. Freezing means the package you send in February is the same package if anyone reopens the file in July — which is exactly what an audit, a partner question, or a lender review later depends on.
Note
Where the accountant takes over: characterization of income, entity treatment, depreciation and basis, and the actual filings are professional work that depends on facts outside the servicing record. Your job ends at a clean, frozen package; theirs begins there.
Where LoanConsole fits
LoanConsole reconciles and freezes the year-end record and exports the supporting data. It prepares records for your accountant; it does not give tax advice or file returns.
Note
This article is not tax, legal, or accounting advice. Work with a qualified professional on filings.