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.

Starting this Friday, Nov 13, we're running a free 7-day sprint: First File in 7 Days. The goal is simple. By next Thursday you'll have one sourced file, or a clearly documented blocker, and a sharper question. It follows the sprint on page 18 of the Starter Map. How it works: - Each morning at 10 AM Eastern I post that day's step here in the community. - - Do the step, then drop a one-line update in the comments of that day's post. Counties and dates only. Never owner names, case numbers or dollar amounts. - - Day 7 (Thursday, Nov 19) ends at office hours, 7–8 PM Eastern, with Carl and Matt, live on Google Meet. Bring your file. What you need: the free Starter Map (surplusfundssecrets.com/starter-map), 30 to 60 minutes a day, and one county. Comment "in" below and name the state you're starting in. This is a research schedule, not a promise of a claim, a recovery or income.

Watch-the-machine day. Today's pull: Decatur County, Georgia — the Tax Commissioner's excess funds list. I'm going to show you the part nobody screenshots: the moment the parse fails. Step 1: pull the file. Two-page PDF, 95,049 bytes, fetched from the county's published document link. Server says it was last touched September 4. No "as of" line anywhere in the file itself. No print date. No labeled total. Step 2: the fast pass. My first parser reads text in order and looks for dollar signs attached to numbers. Result: zero money tokens found. Not a few — zero. The failure is mechanical and kind of funny: every money cell in this file prints the amount first and the dollar sign separately, so a "$" is never attached to its number. A regex built for normal lists reads this file as a list with no money in it. That's the trap. A human eyeballing the PDF sees fine figures everywhere. A naive script sees nothing. Step 3: the rebuild. Instead of trusting reading order, I anchor each record on its sale date token and walk the block that follows it. Columns on this list: date of sale, parcel ID, account number, defendant, street address, city, state, zip, property address, purchase price, excess funds, tax years due. (Names and addresses stay in the file — none of that leaves my parse.) Step 4: reconcile. The rebuild finds 89 records. That predicts 178 decimal amounts — 89 purchase prices and 89 excess figures. The file carries exactly 179 decimal-number tokens: 178 record values plus one unlabeled trailing token at the very foot of page two, sitting above an internal file path. One extra token, accounted for. Every one of the 89 records carries both a purchase price and an excess figure — no blanks, no zeros. What the dates say, counts only: 10 distinct sale dates, oldest 10/6/2020, newest 6/2/2026 — nearly six years of sales on one running list. By year: 2020: 10 rows, 2021: 17, 2022: 5, 2023: 12, 2024: 25, 2025: 18, 2026: 2. The biggest single batch is 25 rows from one December 2024 sale day. The 2026 entries are thin so far — two rows.

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Yesterday's teardown ended with receipts: byte counts and a hash prefix. A member asked the fair follow-up underneath it: are these lists pulled manually or with AI? Both. And where the line sits matters more than the tool. The machine part: our fleet pulls the page, counts the rows, reads every sale date, and ranks the oldest entries — seconds on a small file, minutes on the big metro lists with hundreds of rows, not hours. The human part: judging whether the file is current. Monday's list carried an August label in its link and had no date stamp anywhere inside the document — the only trustworthy date was the server's. A script can't own that judgment; a person does. Same with deciding which entries deserve a closer look. If you're just starting, don't wait for a fleet. Your first rep is smaller and counts just as much: pull one list, count the rows, write down the date span and today's date. That's the whole rep. One member posted "5 rows in" on the homework thread last week — that's a real rep, and the second one usually goes faster. Today's rep, if you want one: pull one list and run it two ways. First pass by hand, second pass any tool you like. Write down where the two answers differ. That gap is where judgment lives — the part a tool can't own. Post your rep in Homework: the gate (which step of the checklist you're on), the county, the row count, the date span, and where your two passes differed. Names, parcels, addresses and amounts stay out of the thread. We are not a law firm and can't provide legal advice; claims are prepared and filed by independent licensed attorneys.