Exceptions Accounting is the practice of monitoring a company's general ledger, bank connections, and balance sheet for flagged anomalies, such as new vendors, unnamed transactions, or unreconciled balances, so attention goes where something has changed.
Rather than reviewing every transaction, exceptions accounting defines rules that surface the few items needing a human decision. The 📝General Ledger flags a new vendor being created, a transaction entered without a name, a vendor put into a new category, or a large change in payment to a vendor compared with the last one. The accounting system's interface, such as QuickBooks Online, flags a bank balance that does not match the book balance, a bank account that is not connected or shows an error, or transactions that have not been downloaded in more than 24 hours. The general ledger and balance sheet report together flag a negative balance in an asset account or a large week-over-week change in a balance sheet balance.
The approach depends on having ledger data in one place. In 📝Weekly Accounting, general ledger transactions from every business are gathered into 📝BigQuery, where exception rules can run across all of them at once; interface checks require reading the accounting system directly, for example with a tool that logs into QuickBooks Online for each business. Bank balances that fail to match still call for judgment about how to fix them, which is where the human review begins.