The clause decides the account
Money arrives months before the date. The bank feed will happily call it income. The contract may say the couple can still have it back. Those two facts are allowed to disagree, and the file has to pick the contract.
Find the cancellation language, the date it locks, and the portion that is kept if the couple steps away. If the money can still go back, the item is a hold. The customer is that date, not a generic weddings customer. The amount sits there until the date earns it or until it is returned.
If the clause says the money is already kept, or the date has passed and the work was done, the fee can be posted. Post it then. Posting it on the day the transfer landed, with no look at the clause, is how a refund later masquerades as a bad month.
Do not use one rule for every date
One couple's contract returns the full hold up to a named week. The next contract keeps the design fee and returns the rest. A file that codes every advance the same way will be right only by accident. Read the page you have. Point that item. Leave the next contract for its own row.
A hold is also not a vendor bill. The florist is owed by the planner, or sometimes paid directly by the couple. Either way, the couple's refundable money does not belong on the florist's vendor record. That record is what you will total before the January forms. Couple money on it inflates the total and confuses the W-9 stack.
The room is a third trap. A hotel that collects a room tax and sends it on has already taken care of that tax. If the planner's file shows it in sales tax payable, the payable is overstated. Move the memo off the payable in an open period. The deposit page is about the couple's money. The vendor total lives on the home, in the closed note about forms, and it uses different sentences on purpose.
What we touch, and what we leave
On a first pass we list the open events, the clause on each, and the item the money sits in now. We do not recode a filed year to make the list prettier. If the return for a year is filed, that year is named and the entries stay. Amendments are a separate decision, made with the return, not a side effect of cleaning the feed.
The work you get is the books for those events, a payroll setup when a person should be on a provider you run, reconciliations that still tie, and statements that can be read by date. The return comes after the open year is one you trust. Nothing here is a promise about a particular refund or a particular fee. The contract in your hand is the authority.
Bring one contract and the customer it posts to. If you have ten, the pattern is usually visible from three. One customer per event is the companion page. Who reads the file names the practice.
Which vendor is still unnamed
Name one vendor whose payments never landed on a single record.
You will be talking to the Steven Palmieri practice.