prepare-a-month-end-close

name	prepare-a-month-end-close
category	money
description	Prepare and control a month-end accounting close with reconciliations, cutoffs, review evidence, financial statements, and unresolved-item tracking. Use when finalizing a reporting period for management or statutory reporting.

prepare-a-month-end-close

Use a controlled calendar and prove each material balance before locking the period.

When to use

• Use for monthly management accounts, consolidated reporting, audit support, or a close-process redesign.
• Only authorized accountants may post, approve, reopen, or lock accounting periods.

Preconditions

• Confirm entities, ledgers, currencies, materiality, reporting deadline, owners, approvers, and system access.
• Freeze the task list and preserve the prior close package as comparative evidence.

Procedure

1. Publish the close calendar with dependencies, preparers, reviewers, due times, and escalation routes.
2. Confirm transaction cutoffs for sales, purchases, payroll, inventory, cash, and intercompany activity.
3. Reconcile bank, payment-processor, receivable, payable, payroll, inventory, fixed-asset, prepaid, deferred-revenue, tax, and debt balances.
4. Record accruals, deferrals, depreciation, allocations, foreign exchange, eliminations, and other approved journal entries with evidence.
5. Test duplicate, late, unbalanced, manual, unusual, and post-close entries.
6. Review the trial balance and account movements against budget, forecast, prior period, and operational measures.
7. Produce income statement, balance sheet, cash-flow, and supporting schedules with consistent mappings.
8. Resolve or formally carry forward exceptions with amount, impact, owner, deadline, and approval.