Recovery playbook
When to stop chasing: write-offs for dormant accounts
Some findings will never recover. The seller churned; the balance is dead; the amount is smaller than the meeting it would take to discuss it. Leaving these open forever feels diligent and functions as rot — a queue nobody trusts, aging reports nobody reads, and a backlog haunting month-end with numbers that will never move. A written-off finding is not an audit failure. It is the audit working. This page gives write-offs the policy they deserve.
Three death conditions
Account churned with no realistic future volume. Balance dead beyond practical reach — paid out long ago, account restricted or closed. Amount below the operational floor where any touch costs more than the item is worth. Any single condition justifies closure; requiring all three is how queues fill with zombies.
The expected-value test
Owed $40 × 10% recovery odds × $15 operational cost per touch is negative expected value — close it without ceremony. The identical arithmetic at $4,000 says pursue aggressively. Running the numbers converts write-off debates from politics into arithmetic, which is the highest compliment a policy can earn.
- $40 owed · 10% odds · $15/touch
- −$11 EV → close
- $4,000 owed · 25% odds · $40/touch
- +$960 EV → pursue
Aging policy, accounting, and lessons
Demote automatically at 30/60/90 days: recover → net → write-off. Nobody should re-decide a $12 item monthly. Book write-offs against the same line the leak came from — the entry is the receipt for the detection programme’s honesty. Then aggregate closed items by cause: the pile ranked by damage is your engineering backlog, delivered with evidence attached.
Revival, and what FeeGuard does
Write-off is not amnesia: new volume on a dormant account reopens the item automatically, converting a zombie into a fresh recovery at the exact moment it becomes possible. FeeGuard ages findings through states with evidence intact, keeps dismissed items searchable, and groups the CSV by cause so the write-off pile becomes the roadmap instead of a graveyard.
Common questions
Is writing findings off admitting the audit failed?
It is the opposite — the audit found real money, the policy measured pursuit honestly, and the business moved on. Audits that never close anything are decoration.
Can a written-off finding come back?
Yes — new volume revives it automatically, which is the best possible timing for a recovery attempt.
Who approves write-offs?
Whoever owns the recovery floor. The threshold already encodes their judgement; approvals just apply it.