A balance sheet had a hidden number in white font inserted between assets and equity to fake balance. The speaker calls this a pet hate: white-on-white tricks that mask real imbalances. Spreadsheet hygiene matters.
When you're looking at a balance sheet and you're not quite sure why it's balanced because you don't think it should, that's a bit of a different story. And in the end, after much investigation, I found what they had done was to hack a— plug a number. So the imbalance, there wasn't imbalance as I thought there should be. They hacked the number in between your total asset line and your equity line, summed it in, and then white fonted this number so invisible to the naked eye. So anyway, there's one of my pet hates as well as a white on white font.
Trust and Leadership Lessons for FP&A From 100+ Top Leaders with CFO Jon Laudie
