THE FLASH · Tuesday, 6 October 2026
Sponsorship, mostly paid by the owner
OPENING BALANCE
A football club booked £949.94m of sponsorship income from its Abu Dhabi sponsors over nine seasons. The sponsors paid £119.25m of it.
An independent commission found the owner quietly paid the other £830.69m, routed through the sponsors so it would land as revenue instead of equity. Manchester City lodged an appeal on 1 October and maintains it is innocent.
Substance over form has never had a better worked example.
ON THE AGENDA
Your floating-rate debt just got 25 basis points dearer. The math is one line.
Tariff refunds open a new phase today, and $1.3bn is stuck because importers never gave CBP their bank details.
Several projects, one bank account, zero ties. The fix is not where you think.
THE SUSPENSE ACCOUNT
A question that turned up on r/FPandA this week (paraphrased), and comes up every time a company runs projects through one bank account:
I'm building actuals for a three-statement model. P&L and balance sheet come out of SAP by project. But every project shares one bank account, and AP and payroll payments aren't tagged by project. How do I build actual cash flow by project so the three statements tie?
Stop chasing bank payments. Build project cash flow indirectly, and let the bank account be its own column.
Operating cash per project = net income, plus D&A and other non-cash charges, plus or minus the change in that project's AR, contract assets and liabilities, AP, accruals and payroll liabilities.
If the board wants direct-method lines, they fall out of roll-forwards. AP paid: opening AP, plus invoices coded to the project, less closing AP.
Payroll paid: payroll expense less the change in accrued payroll, on the same split the P&L already uses.
Each project's net cash goes to a "due to / due from treasury" line. Projects plus treasury equals the movement in the cash account, and the bank rec takes it to the statement. That is your tie-out.
Clearing entry: make each payment inherit the project from the invoice it clears. In SAP that usually means document splitting by profit center, with each project mapped to one. Then nobody allocates cash after the fact.
A reply in the thread makes the same case in more detail.
A SECOND OPINION, FROM THE SAME SEAT
The Suspense Account takes one question a week. The Control Room takes the rest.
Six rooms, one standard: nobody pitches, nobody recruits, and anyone working the room as a lead list does not stay in it.
Ask the room: put up a real number and the assumption under it. Straight answers, same seat.
The close: day counts, what broke, what you changed. The Q3 close is a good one to start with.
Models and assets: the working files we build, including a direct-method 13-week cash flow workbook that tracks forecast against actual.
Tools and vendors: reviews from people who signed the contract, not people who watched the demo.
It is free for readers. No checkout and no card. You click Join, you are in.
SUBSEQUENT EVENTS
Recognize: the Fed raised rates. On 16 September the FOMC voted 12–0 to lift the target range a quarter point, to 3.75–4%.
So what: on $50m of unhedged floating-rate debt, 25 basis points is $125,000 a year. Re-run interest coverage before the Q3 board pack does it for you.
Recognize: tariff refunds, Phase 3 opens today. CBP's refund system now takes claims on entries liquidated more than 80 days ago, from importers with a refund case pending at the Court of International Trade. Importer numbers accepted by 30 July can file from today; later ones follow on a rolling basis.
So what: as of mid-September, 20,184 refunds worth about $1.3bn were on hold because the importer never gave CBP bank details. The government is trying to pay you and has nowhere to send the money. Your AR team knows that feeling from the other side.
Disclose: big-company CFOs think the market is expensive. In Deloitte's Q3 CFO Signals, 83% of 200 North American CFOs at companies with $1bn-plus revenue called US equities overvalued, up from 49% in Q2. 90% said they were optimistic about their own company's financial prospects.
So what: the market looks expensive and their own company's prospects look good. Same survey, same quarter, same people.
SUPPORTING SCHEDULES
The links behind the numbers. Open what your seat needs.
The control that catches this. A pediatric clinic's ex-CFO got two years for more than 300 transfers to herself, $540,599 over about four years. The fix is boring, which is the point.
What roughly 500 finance chiefs are worried about. The Q3 CFO Survey from Duke, the Richmond Fed and the Atlanta Fed ranks monetary policy first, inflation a close second. Median expected full-time employment growth for 2026: 1.7%.
IMMATERIAL
Below materiality: nothing in here moves the number. You will read it first anyway.
Panel four is what an independent commission found, across 40 pages. City is appealing.
The Glossary Nobody Approved, budget edition
Backfill: a new role wearing a leaver's name tag, usually two grades up.
Stretch target: a number Sales is handed in October and explains in July.
Zero-based budgeting: announced at kickoff, abandoned by the second draft.
The thread: one r/FPandA poster reckons "Whoever invented the Workday platform" must have had beef with finance. The replies turn into a ranking of whose planning tool hurts most. Kindest review: "Great consolidation system. Terrible for everything else." Best consolation: "Be happy it's not Onestream."
CONFIRMATION REQUEST
How many working days from 30 September until your Q3 books are closed and locked?
We publish the spread once enough of you answer to make it mean something.
BELOW THE LINE
How did today's Flash land?
Got a number you're arguing about this month? Subscribers can hit reply on any issue. The good ones get cleared in the Suspense Account, anonymized, with your OK.
The Workpaper lands Thursday.
Want to reach the people who build the budget and sign it? Sponsor an issue.
Until the next reforecast,
James
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Disclaimer: Our commentary is editorial point of view, not accounting, tax, legal or investment advice. We check every statistic we cite against its primary source, but we have not seen your books. Before you act on anything here, talk to someone who has. The rep letter still has your name on it, not ours.