perform-a-financial-close-review

name	perform-a-financial-close-review
category	money
description	Perform a financial close review across reconciliations, journals, estimates, subledgers, analytics, disclosures, and signoffs. Use when determining whether period-end accounts are complete, supportable, and ready to lock or report.

perform-a-financial-close-review

Review evidence and unresolved exposure, not only completion checkmarks.

When to use

• Use for monthly, quarterly, annual, transaction, or regulatory closes.
• Set materiality and escalation rules before reviewing exceptions.

Procedure

1. Confirm period, entities, ledgers, reporting basis, timetable, materiality, owners, dependencies, and signoff authority.
2. Reconcile cash, receivables, payables, payroll, tax, fixed assets, inventory, debt, equity, intercompany, revenue, deferred balances, and key estimates.
3. Inspect reconciliation age, support, reviewer independence, reconciling items, roll-forward, and disposition.
4. Review manual and unusual journals for source, purpose, preparer, approver, period, account, entity, reversal, and access conflicts.
5. Challenge accruals, provisions, impairments, reserves, prepayments, capitalization, allocation, foreign exchange, and estimates against policy and subsequent evidence.
6. Analyze actual-to-budget, prior-period, balance-sheet, cash-flow, ratio, product, customer, and entity movements.
7. Verify subledger control totals, interface completeness, consolidation, eliminations, currency translation, and retained earnings.
8. Assess cut-off, subsequent events, commitments, contingencies, going concern, disclosures, tax, and regulatory reporting.
9. Record open items by value, risk, owner, due date, treatment, approval, and reporting effect.
10. Approve lock only when criteria are met. Control any reopen through reason, authority, journal, re-review, and versioned reporting.

Done

• A close-review record links reconciliations, journals, analytics, estimates, disclosures, open items, signoffs, and lock status
• Ledger, subledger, interface, journal, cutoff, consolidation, and post-close checks verify the reported period and every approved reopen