The carry register: taxes, insurance, interest, each sourced

1 · Learn the move · Template pattern

Holding land costs money every month you hold it, and the cost that sinks a hold is the one nobody wrote down. Taxes, insurance, interest on the note, the annual entity fee, mowing, the survey you keep putting off. A carry register is the fixed page that lists every line, what it costs, and where that figure came from. A template earns its keep here because a register gets compared year to year and parcel to parcel, and a register in a new shape every time cannot be compared. The column that matters most is SOURCE. A tax figure from this year's bill is a figure. A tax figure from 'about what it was' is a guess, and the model will supply the guess unless the template forbids it. So the template says what an unknown cell holds: [NEEDS: the bill, the declarations page, the note]. And no total is computed from a column with a [NEEDS] in it, because a total with a hole in it reads as complete.

Build my carry register as a table: LINE | AMOUNT | PERIOD | SOURCE | NEXT DOCUMENT DUE. Rows exactly as listed. AMOUNT only from a pasted bill, policy, note or invoice. Unknowns read [NEEDS: the document]. No total if any AMOUNT is [NEEDS]. [rows] [documents]