Monthly escrow reconciliation checklist for developers
Short answer
Reconciling escrow each month means proving, unit by unit, that every receipt belongs to a buyer and that the bank balance equals the sum of the unit balances. The ten steps below are the routine that holds up in an audit. Run them after every month-end close, and record why any step could not be completed.
Updated: 28 October 2026
Most developers already do some of this. The failures come from the steps that get skipped when the team is busy, usually the unidentified receipts and the balance test.
Each step produces evidence you can hand to a trustee bank or an auditor. Where a step cannot be completed in the month, write down why and who owns the follow-up.
The monthly checklist
Freeze the period. Agree the cut-off date and time for the month and close the bank statement to match it.
Export every receipt. Pull every credit on the project escrow account for the period, not a summary of it.
Match each receipt to a unit and buyer. Use the account number, reference, payer name, amount and date, and record the basis for each match.
Separate what you cannot identify. Put unmatched receipts on their own list with date, amount and payer name; never leave them inside the matched total.
Clear unidentified receipts. Contact the payer or the bank and close each item within the month, carrying the rest forward with an owner and a date.
Reconcile the bank balance to the sum of unit balances. If the two do not agree, stop and find the difference before reporting anything.
Check receipts against the SPA schedule. For every unit, compare what has arrived with what should have arrived by this date, and flag the shortfalls.
Check the next instalment is covered. Confirm a valid mandate or cheque exists for every unit with an instalment due next month.
Record failed and returned payments. List each one with the bank's reason and start follow-up within one working day.
Sign off and carry the evidence forward. Produce per-unit balances and releases requested, note anything due at handover, and file the working papers for audit.
Frequently asked questions
How long should reconciliation take?
For a few hundred units with clean payment references, about a day. Where receipts are identified by hand from screenshots and payer names, it runs to several days and is usually finished late, which is how errors survive into the next month.
What if the bank balance and the unit balances never agree?
Something is missing from the unit ledger or double-counted in it. Do not adjust the total to make it fit; trace the difference to a specific receipt or release and document the correction, because an unexplained difference is what auditors ask about first.
Do we need special software to do this?
Not to start. What breaks first with spreadsheets is step three: matching receipts to units. Once the volume of monthly transfers passes a few hundred, a structure that identifies each payment on arrival does more than any spreadsheet template.
Written by
Shamaz Khan, founder of Rasikh; previously ran Quantl, a regulated private-markets brokerage in the UAE.
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