One row is gone · Surplus Funds Secrets

One row is gone

Same county, one month between our pulls. The list got shorter.

On Oct. 11 we read Denton County's District Clerk excess tax funds list: 28 rows, footer stamped "Current as of 10/01/2026." Today's pull: the filename now says 11.10.26, the footer says "Current as of 11/10/2026," and the list holds 27 rows.

One row is gone.

Which row? Diff today's file against our saved October copy and the missing row shows itself. We're not naming it here. What no version of the list tells you is why. The four columns are unchanged (case number, name, deposit amount, excess fund date) and there is no claim column, no status field, no legend. A claim could have been filed, funds paid out, a court order entered, or a correction made to the list. The document is silent on which. That is exactly why you save every pull instead of treating the snapshot as permanent.

What today's file looks like, counts and dates only:

27 data rows, one page, sorted alphabetically
Excess fund dates run 5/5/2021 through 9/30/2026
Year buckets: 2021 x1, 2023 x4, 2024 x6, 2025 x6, 2026 x10
The oldest entry, from 2021, is the same one we flagged in October — a case that appears to have been filed years earlier. Still on the list.
Credit where due: the filename matches the footer date. Last week we caught a county whose filename didn't match what was inside the file. You verify both; you never assume either.

One honest note on method: our first parse matched 26 rows because one long name cell wraps onto a second line and breaks a naive line pattern. The cross-check caught it — case-number tokens: 27; money tokens: 27 row amounts plus the footer total; row dates: 27, anchored one-per-row to the money column, plus the footer date. Every count reconciled by a second method before this post went up.

If you're working one of these lists, your homework is one step: save the PDF the day you pull it, with the date you pulled it. A month from now, the diff is the story — and sometimes the diff is the only way to know anything happened at all.

This is education, not legal advice. For your situation, talk to a licensed attorney in the relevant state.

Your turn: ever diffed two pulls of the same county list and caught a change? Which county?

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One row is gone