Why do bank statements end on *SUCH* wildly inconsistent days of the month?
Looking at your dates, I think I see a pattern.  It appears that your statement closing date is always 17 business days before the last business day of the month.  For example, if you start at May 31 and start counting backwards, skipping Saturdays, Sundays, and May 30 (Memorial Day), you'll see that May 5 is 17 business days before May 31.  I cannot explain why Bank of America would do this.  If you ask them, let us know what they say. If it bothers you, find another bank.  I do most of my banking (checking, savings, etc.) with a local credit union. Their statements end on the last day of the month, every month without fail. (Very nice, in my opinion.) I have two credit cards with nationally known banks, and although those statements end in the middle of the month, they are consistently on the same date every month. (One of them is on the 13th; the other date I can't recall right now.) You are right, a computer does the work, and your statement date should be able to fall on a weekend without trouble. Even when these were assembled by hand, the statement date could still be on a weekend, and they just wouldn't write it up until the following Monday.  You should be able to find another bank or credit union that does this. They need to spread the work for all customers over the whole month, and they don't work on weekends. Combine the two, and the rule becomes clear - if months have minimum of N working days, 1/N of all customers gets set on each day. You seem to be on day 5: If the month starts with a Monday, the fifth working day is the 5. (Friday); if there is a Sat or Sun in between, it will be the 6th, and if there is both a Sat and a Sun in there, it will be the 7th. However, the statement itself is not very important at all. It is just the day where they print it on paper (or even only on a PDF). You can see your bank account activity every day 24/7 by checking online, and nothing keeps you from printing it on every 1st of the month if you want (or every day, or whenever you prefer).
"If you're curious, here are my goals behind this silly madness You said it... The last two words, I mean...:-) If you're auditing your statements - why do you need to keep the info after the audit? You got the statement for last month, you verified that the Starbucks charge that appears there is the same as in your receipts - why keeping them further? Done, no $10 dripping, throw them away. Why do you need to keep your refrigerator owner's manual? What for? You don't know how to operate a refrigerator? You don't know who the manufacturer is to look it up online in case you do need later? Read it once, mark the maintenance details in your calendar (like: TODO: Change the water filter in 3 months), that's it. Done. Throw it away (to the paper recycle bin). You need the receipt as a proof of purchase for warranty? Make a ""warranty"" folder and put all of them there, why in expenses? You don't buy a refrigerator every months. That's it, this way you've eliminated the need to keep monthly expenses folders. Either throw stuff away after the audit or keep it filed where you really need it. You only need a folder for two months at most (last and current), not for 12 months in each of the previous 4 years." While it's wise, easier and safer to check your transactions online a few times a month, I opt to receive and file paper statements as a hard copy back up of account history. Any reconciliation I perform is a quick glance to make sure the numbers sound right. It's probably a small waste of time and space, but it settles some of my paranoia (due to my training as a computer engineer)  about failure of electronic banking systems. If someone tampers with bank records or a SAN explodes and wipes out a bunch of account data, then I will have years worth of paper statements to back up my numbers.  Having years worth of statements printed on the banks stationary will have better credibility in court than a .pdf or printout thereof that could have been doctored, in case I ever needed to take my bank to court. A little piece of mind for the price of a letter opener, a square foot file box and a couple of minutes a month. "I use online banking as much as possible and I think it may help you get closer to your goal.  I see you want to know where the money goes and save time so it should work for you like it did for me. I used to charge everything or write checks and then pay a big visa bill.  My problem was I never knew exactly how much I spent because neither Visa or check writing are record systems. They just generate transactions records.  I made it a goal use online banking to match my spending to the available cash and ended up ok usually 9-10 months out of the year. I started with direct deposit of my paycheck.  Each Saturday, I sit down and within a half hour, I've paid the bills for the week and know where I stand for the following week.  Any new bill that comes in, I add it to online banking even if it's not a recurring expense.  I also pull down cash from the ATM but just enough to allow me to do what I have to do.  If it's more than $30 or $40 bucks, I use the debit card so that expense goes right to the online bank statement. My monthly bank statement gives me a single report with everything listed.  Mortgage, utilities, car payment, cable bill, phone bill, insurance, newspaper, etc...  It does not record these transactions in generic categories; they actually say Verizon or Comcast or Shop Rite.  I found this serves as the only report I need to see what's happening with my budget.   It may take a while to change to a plan like this one. but you'll now have a system that shows you in a single place where the money goes.  Move all bills that are ""auto-pay"" to the online system and watch your Visa bill go down.  The invested time is likely what you're doing now writing checks.  Hope this helps." "To answer your question briefly: net income is affected by many things inside and outside of management control, and must be supplemented by other elements to gain a clear picture of a company's health. To answer your question in-depth, we must look at the history of financial reporting: Initially, accounting was primarily cash-based. That is, a business records a sale when a customer pays them cash, and records expenses when cash goes out the door. This was not a perfectly accurate system, as cashflow might be quite erratic even if sales are stable (collection times may differ, etc.). To combat problems with cash-based accounting, financial reporting moved to an accrual-based system. An accrual is the recording of an item before it has fully completed in a cash transaction. For example, when you ship goods to a customer and they owe you money, you record the revenue - then you record the future collection of cash as a balance sheet item, rather than an income statement item. Another example: if your landlord charges you rent on December 31st for the past year, then in each month leading up to December, you accrue the expense on the income statement, even though you haven't paid the landlord yet. Accrual-based accounting leaves room for accounting manipulation. Enron is a prime example; among other things, they were accruing revenue for sales that had not occurred. This 'accelerated' their income, by having it recorded years before cash was ever collectible. There are specific guidelines that restrict doing things like this, but management will still attempt to accelerate net income as much as possible under accounting guidelines. Public companies have their financial statements audited by unrelated accounting firms - theoretically, they exist to catch material misstatements in the financial statements. Finally, some items impacting profit do not show up in net income - they show up in ""Other Comprehensive Income"" (OCI). OCI is meant to show items that occurred in the year, but were outside of management control. For example, changes in the value of foreign subsidiaries, due to fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Or changes in the value of company pension plan, which are impacted by the stock market. However, while OCI is meant to pick up all non-management-caused items, it is a grey area and may not be 100% representative of this idea. So in theory, net income is meant to represent items within management control. However, given the grey area in accounting interpretation, net income may be 'accelerated', and it also may include some items that occurred by some 'random business fluke' outside of company control. Finally, consider that financial statements are prepared months after the last year-end. So a company may show great profit for 2015 when statements come out in March, but perhaps Jan-March results are terrible. In conclusion, net income is an attempt at giving what you want: an accurate representation of the health of a company in terms of what is under management control. However it may be inaccurate due to various factors, from malfeasance to incompetence.  That's why other financial measures exist - as another way to answer the same question about a company's health, to see if those answers agree. ex: Say net income is $10M this year, but was only $6M last year - great, it went up by $4M! But now assume that Accounts Receivable shows $7M owed to the company at Dec 31, when last year there was only $1M owed to the company. That might imply that there are problems collecting on that additional revenue (perhaps revenue was recorded prematurely, or perhaps they sold to customers who went bankrupt).  Unfortunately there is no single number that you can use to see the whole company - different metrics must be used in conjunction to get a clear picture." The 'standard' thing to do, after double checking your numbers to see if you can find or remember the actual reason for the discrepancy is to use an Income account for 'extra' money and an expense account for 'lost' money. The Imbalance account is meant as a temporary placeholder for monies not yet put into their right account. I personally use Income:Other Income for such found money, and Expenses:Adjustment for lost money. "Banks have a financial, and regulational duty called ""Know your customer"", established to avoid a number of historical problems occurring again, such as money laundering, terrorism financing, fraud, etc. Thanks to the scale, and scope of the problem (millions of customers, billions of transactions a day), the way they're handling this usually involves fuzzy logics matching, looking for irregular patterns, problem escalation, and other warning signs. When exceeding some pre-set limit, these signal clues are then filtered, and passed on for human inspection. Needless to say, these algorithms are not perfect, although, thanks to financial pressure, they are improving. In order to understand why your trading account has been suspended, it's useful to look at the incentives: false positives -suspending your trade, and assuming you guilty until proven otherwise- could cost them merely your LTV (lifetime value of customer -how much your business brings in as profit); while false negatives -not catching you while engaging in activities listed above- might cost them multi-month investigations, penalties, and court.  Ultimately, this isn't against you. I've been with the bank for 15 years and the money in the accounts has been very slowly accumulated via direct-deposit paychecks over that time. From this I gather the most likely explanation, is that you've hit somekind of account threshold, that the average credit-happy customers usually do not exceed, which triggered a routine checkup. How do you deal with it? Practice puppetry! There is only one way to survive angry customers emotionally: you have to realize that they’re not angry at you; they’re angry at your business, and you just happen to be a convenient representative of that business. And since they’re treating you like a puppet, an iconic stand-in for the real business, you need to treat yourself as a puppet, too. Pretend you’re a puppeteer. The customer is yelling at the puppet. They’re not yelling at you. They’re angry with the puppet. Your job is to figure out, “gosh, what can I make the puppet say that will make this person a happy customer?”  In an investigation case, go with boredom: The puppet doesn't care, have no feelings, and is eternally patient. Figure out what are the most likely words that will have the matter ""mentally resolved"" from the investigator's point of view, tell them what they have to hear, and you'll have case closed in no time. Hope this helps." You're knowingly providing a payment method which has insufficient funds to meet the terms of the contract, because you are too lazy to comply with the contract. That's unethical and fraudulent behavior. Will you get in trouble? I don't know. I'd suggest getting acquainted with an electronic calendar that can remind you to do things. It would depend how the simulation is run.  Is all of your revenue coming through A/R?  Is none of it being paid until the end of the credit term?  Are they simulating disruptions in revenue streams?  If it's simulating daily then cash flows can be all over the place depending on who pays when.  In a real business if you set credit terms of net 30 you will find some people pay you the day after you send them the invoice, some pay on a certain day of the month,  some wait until day 30, some wait until you call them, and a few don't pay at all.  They tend to simplify this in the classroom to longer intervals (months) and just have everyone pay you timely minus some allowance for bad debt.    If that's the case, then whatever interval they have you on I would just assume you get paid ~95% of the A/R due over that term.