Canada can anyone help? i'm stuck on the concept of 'breaks' or 'outages' when doing reconciliations

[BigDan]

In my current job I'm doing reconciliations for various contracts. One of the things I'm doing is investigating contracts that have 'breaks', also called 'outages'. But I don't really get what that means. I do at a cursory level but that's it. I've asked my trainer but haven't gotten a great explanation and it's not something I'm comfortable asking tbh 2 months into the job as it seems like something one should know by now. I know others advise to keep asking questions but in my experience that's not actually a good thing, I've been told in the past I ask dumb questions (no one phrased it that way but that's what they've implied).

Anyway so at a high level I'm investigating a GL that's a suspense account. It has say 20 contracts in it. An example of a contract would be where a doctor might've taken out a loan to buy an xray machine. Apparently my bank would handle that contract and possibly be the go-between with the two parties.

Anyway so everything's functioning fine if the entire GL has a balance of zero (since it's a suspense account) and each contract in the GL also has a balance of zero. That much I get. But I'd like to get a further explanation of how this works and how a break might occur.

Can anyone help with this? I realize it's not a typical accounting question so I wonder how much help I'll be able to get with this.

 

[Fidget]

I'm not following what you mean by this. A break, or outage, to me would suggest something along the lines of a payment free period, yet I'm struggling to join the dots between that and suspense accounts.