Errors & Risk Review

Some things in a client's books are not wrong arithmetically — they are just wrong. A bill paid twice. A round-number journal entry keyed on a Sunday. A balance parked in suspense and forgotten.

Kraal's Errors & Risk Review step looks for exactly that kind of problem. It reads the period's ledger, journal, and payables activity, raises anything that does not look right as a finding, and hands each one to you with the records behind it.

It reports; it never posts

Errors & Risk Review produces no journal entries and proposes no corrections. It flags, ranks, and evidences — the correction is yours to make through the normal Corrections & Adjustments flow.

What Kraal checks for

Category	What it means
Potential duplicate entries	Two journal entries in the period that look like the same transaction booked twice — same counterparty, same amount, close together in time.
Potential duplicate payments	The same vendor apparently paid twice for the same thing, the classic version of an expensive mistake.
Round-figure manual entries	Manual journal entries at suspiciously round amounts, which often indicate a plug or an estimate that was never revisited.
Weekend or backdated postings	Entries posted outside normal working days, or created well after the date they were posted to.
Suspense account activity	Movement in suspense or clearing accounts that has not been cleared out by period end.
Statistically unusual amounts	Amounts that do not fit the account's own history, and digit patterns across a large population of entries that do not look like naturally occurring numbers.
Cutoff and policy signals	Activity around the period boundary, or postings that run against the client's stated policy.

These are signals, not verdicts. A weekend posting at a firm that runs weekend payroll is perfectly normal; a round-number accrual may be exactly what was intended. The step's job is to make sure the item was seen.

Kraal only reports what it could actually check. If a source could not be read for the period, the step says so on its workpaper rather than returning a clean, empty result — an empty findings list is never produced to cover a failed read.

Reading a finding

Every finding carries the same four things:

• Severity — critical, high, medium, low, or info, shown as a chip so the list reads worst-first at a glance.
• A title — what was found, in one line.
• The reason it was flagged — a plain sentence naming the pattern, for example "Two payments to the same vendor for the same amount within a few days."
• The underlying records — the actual entries, payments, or account balances involved, so you can go straight to the source instead of hunting for it.

Where Kraal has one, a finding also suggests a recommended action and states what would resolve it. Amounts, counterparties, and dates appear as read from the books; anything Kraal does not know shows an em dash.

A finding that keeps being detected is refreshed rather than duplicated — you see one finding with an updated last-seen time, not the same problem ten times. A finding you already closed is not silently reopened either; Kraal reopens one only if it materially worsened, and notes why.

Where to find it

Each close period has its own Errors & Risk Review page, opened from the period's close checklist step — the breadcrumb reads Close › the period › Errors & Risk. The Errors & Risk entry in the accounting sidebar's Close group takes you to the Close overview first, where you pick the period whose findings you want.

Dispositioning findings

Each finding gets one of three decisions.

Action	Use it when	What Kraal records
Resolve	The issue was real and has been dealt with — corrected, reversed, or otherwise cleared.	Who resolved it, when, and any note you added.
Dismiss	The finding is not a problem for this client.	Who dismissed it, when, and a reason, which is required.
Escalate	It needs a second pair of eyes, a partner review, or client follow-up before anyone can call it.	Who escalated it and when, keeping the finding open.

Dismissing without a reason is not possible. The reason is what makes a dismissal reviewable later — by your reviewer, by a partner, or by an auditor asking why a duplicate-payment flag was closed without a correction.

Every disposition is written to the finding's history and to the client's audit trail, so the full life of a finding — first detected, last seen, who decided what and why — is reconstructable after the close. See Audit Trail & Activity Log.

Dispositioning requires close-review permission. Without it you can read findings but the actions do not appear.

Where it appears in the close

Errors & Risk Review runs in the adjustments stage of the close checklist, before the review pass, and shows up as a normal row on the Close Sheet.

The step asks for review while any critical or high finding is still open. It does not hard-block the period on its own — it makes sure a person has looked at the serious items before the financials are approved. Medium, low, and informational findings are reported without holding the step.

The step's workpaper records the period's counts by severity and category plus the most significant findings, and is archived into the Close Binder with the rest of the period's evidence.

The findings register and download

The Errors & Risk page lists the period's findings with filters for status, severity, and category, and an expandable panel per finding showing the reason and the underlying records.

Download findings (Excel) exports the register as an .xlsx with two sheets:

• Findings — every finding with its severity, category, reason, amounts, counterparty, and status, filterable in Excel.
• Summary — counts and totals by severity and category built from live formulas, plus tie-out rows comparing the workbook's own totals with the figures Kraal exported. OK means they agree; anything else should be investigated before you rely on the file.

The download is a working paper, not a system of record. Editing it changes nothing in Kraal.

It also runs between closes

Errors & Risk Review is not only a close step. Kraal runs the same checks continuously in the background, so a duplicate payment made on the 8th surfaces in-month rather than waiting for the next close. Background findings appear in the same register, with the same severities and the same dispositions; the only difference is that they are not tied to a close period. See Kraal Sweeps.

Troubleshooting

• A finding is a false positive — dismiss it with a reason describing why it is normal for this client. It stays dismissed unless the situation materially worsens.
• The close step keeps asking for review — at least one critical or high finding is still open. Resolve or dismiss it to clear the request; escalating leaves it open and keeps review active.
• I resolved the problem but the finding is still open — resolving is an explicit action. Correcting the books does not close the finding by itself.
• The same issue appears in two findings — check whether they are genuinely different records; distinct entries produce distinct findings even when the root cause is shared.
• No findings this period — read the step's workpaper before treating that as an all-clear. Kraal reports anything it could not check.
• I can't resolve or dismiss — dispositioning needs close-review permission for that client.

Related guides

• Accrual Identification — the companion step that proposes accruals Kraal believes are missing.
• Corrections & Adjustments — how to fix something a finding uncovered.
• The Close Sheet — working the period the findings belong to.
• Account Reconciliation — account-level evidence, differences, exceptions, and signoffs.
• Autonomy & Safety — what Kraal does on its own and what always waits for a person.