Maybeth Escobar

It is incredibly challenging for one to ensure that all the figures in the report are accurate while working fast to meet the deadline. However, there are some ways that you can improve the result of your close process. Your goal must be to reconcile as many accounts as you can each month. These are accounts that deal with high volumes of transactions, making them susceptible to being off by a notable amount. There are instances wherein some expenses may be paid out after the period that they are in, and it is the accountant’s responsibility to accrue for those. For example, if a company pays its sales commissions the month after they’ve earned it, the commissions need to be counted as commissions payable at the end of the month that the sales happened on an accrual basis. Let’s say your company has earned $200,000 in revenue this month, in the form of customer purchases.

In addition, your accounts payable records can impact everything from your business’s cash flow to its ability to attract outside investors, its credit rating, and even its borrowing costs. If you use petty cash, it is important to keep records of those payments as well and reconcile those receipts with the balance in your petty cash fund. If they don’t even out, you are missing a transaction or a receipt. When closing your books at the end of the month, record any payments related to your fixed assets. Compare your invoices with your records to make sure you aren’t missing any customer payments.

Check expenses to see if they have been recorded in the correct accounts and in the correct period, and that accruals and prepaids are accurately reflected. Presenting a complete and accurate representation of the organization typically requires monthly journal entries for accrued expenses, amortization, depreciation, and other activity. In most cases, accounting systems are able to automate recurring journal entries. Review the time it took for you to close your books this month, so you’re able to get an estimate of approximately when you should start closing your books next time.

Where Does The Month End Close Process Begin?

Bench gives you a dedicated bookkeeper supported by a team of knowledgeable small business experts. We’re here to take the guesswork out of running your own business—for good. Your bookkeeping team imports bank statements, categorizes transactions, and prepares financial statements every month.

During your monthly close, cross-check your records to make sure you paid all bills and invoices. Chances are, you probably don’t have time to record transactions every day.

• Managing invoices often takes a lot of time and effortfor a few reasons, but one of the biggest is that businesses typically lack a singular place and process for finding and paying them.
• When it fails, frustration mounts, time is lost and the likelihood that your staff will use the unapproved workarounds instead increases.
• Make sure your receipts and records match the balance of your petty cash fund.
• The purpose of this month-end close policy is to provide guidance for the period-end close cycles required to prepare financial statements.

While banks and investors expect to review reports that are in accordance with GAAP principles, the SEC and IRS require month end close process faultless financial statements. When you face any challenging situation, it’s often useful to break it down into parts.

Look At Fixed Assets

At the end of each month, there’s no denying that companies are under lots of pressure to get their books closed ASAP. Depending on the magnitude of the company and the number of people involved the time taken to close the books will vary, but generally, it’s a realistic goal to have them closed within seven days for most companies. It should be noted that sacrificing accuracy for speed isn’t necessarily the best way to end things, but taking too long might negatively affect your next month and productivity in the grand scheme of things. If your accounting system’s included reporting tools meet GAAP requirements, that may seem like enough. But ask yourself this, “do they give business leaders the information they need to make smart decisions? If the answer is no, or you are unsure, now is the time to improve the month-end closing process. It is important to review the information reported on the monthly financial statements.

IRA Financial Reports reflecting financial information through the latest month closed are generally available the morning after the monthly close is completed. The reality, though, is that many shops are not using a month-end close checklist or anything close to it. Most shop owners haven’t heard of it or they think they’re just too busy to sit down and look at the numbers. The reality is, once you start performing this check, it becomes an easy (and non-time-consuming!) way to check on your shop at the end of each month. You need to double-check your profit from October, so you run the P&L. Service Order Workflow Receive repair requests and generate service orders quickly and efficiently. Inventory Management Manage parts across multiple locations and easily order from vendors.

Once you decide that your month-end closing process isn’t working, you need to diagnose the problem and take corrective action. Do you have a cumbersome process that is creating unnecessary work? These symptoms might include monthly closings dragging longer and longer into the next month, finance professionals putting in significant overtime at the beginning of each month or general tension related to the process. To avoid mistakes, review your financial information before the month-end close. Ask someone who didn’t prepare the accounts to review them so they’ll find errors or problems you didn’t notice.

When using disconnected systems that rely on duplicate data entry, creating financial reports takes time. But when your financial statements are so far delayed, you can barely see the period they cover in your rearview mirror, the value of the insight they deliver is diminished. After all, when businesses can see trends in real-time and adjust quickly, they are much more competitive than those who can’t react to changing trends until months later. Monthly close processes serve as a cutoff point for transactions, as they are essentially permanent income statement accounts. Income statement accounts are temporary and are only intended to store data for a certain amount of time. Once this data is transferred to a balance sheet using a month-end process the results can be viewed for a longer amount of time and portray the aggregate of financial activity at a single glance. Another thing that you might find beneficial is to create a month-end close checklist and actively tick off all the satisfied criteria, which we’ll get to later.

Keep Your Businesss Books In Shipshape With A Month

Integrated workflows ensure that tasks are completed in the correct order and in the most efficient timeframes, by removing the need for managers to waste time chasing up the completion of tasks. Employees previously occupied with keeping data moving are now freed to perform higher-value tasks, such as reviewing reports and complex exceptions. In general, focusing on good data governance can help your organization streamline and speed up the close process.

• The big picture takeaway here is that closing time costs you valuable time and energy which would be better spent on strategic decision making.
• When using disconnected systems that rely on duplicate data entry, creating financial reports takes time.
• Today, you’ll find our 431,000+ members in 130 countries and territories, representing many areas of practice, including business and industry, public practice, government, education and consulting.
• In addition, doing inventory monthly allows you to see what is selling and what needs to be re-ordered.
• If you overstock, you’ll trap money unnecessarily in inventory and risk wastage.

In turn, this simplifies and streamlines a number of other accounting procedures, including month-end for each month to come and the annual version of month-end known as year-end close. Currently, a massive 79% of finance teams are under pressure to complete a faster close process. Astonishingly, nearly two-thirds of finance departments are using only spreadsheets to complete their account reconciliation process. Spreadsheets may be a useful and relatively cheap tool, but they are certainly not the swiftest or most reliable way to reconcile thousands of accounts by the end of each month. The majority of financial professionals already work overtime during the monthly close process and typically do not close the books within the first three days, well past its due date.

Business Is Our Business

When a team notices anomalies in the data, then it’s important to conduct an investigation and fix the issue. For example, you can review your Profits and Losses by period to see that transactions in the accounting period and general ledger are in accordance. Additionally, auditors may be asked to review your team’s work, which brings audit risk to light. The creation of an audit report doesn’t need to suck up any more of your team’s time. With automation software, it’s easy to create audit reports because the system stores every action that’s been taken within the system so audit trails are created automatically in the system. Cash basis is an accounting method that is based on the cash coming into and out of a business. However, there’s a delay in transaction time, so the records may be distorted from reality.

The process is tedious and time consuming—but it’s also crucial to ensure your company runs efficiently. Closing the books each month gives executives the information and perspective they need to understand where the business is right now so they can make sound strategic decisions for the future. In accounting, monthly close is a series of steps and procedures that are followed so that a company’s monthly financial statements are in compliance with the accrual method of accounting. Once all income, payments, and deposits have been recorded, you need to make sure that your accounts payable and receivable match outstanding customer and vendor invoices. This is where discrepancies can easily show up and if they do, you need to double check invoices and payments and reconcile the two. Some organizations may have stand-alone software that needs to be reconciled with the general ledger. For example, a nonprofit may have revenue streams coming from programs, retail, and philanthropy.

Accounting systems often have integrated modules such as payables, sales , or investments to manage a specific function of the company. Part of the closing process is to reconcile the subsidiary ledger with the general ledger.

What Is Important When Conducting An Accounting Month

Adding some fluidity to procedures to allow adaptation to employees’ personalities and to changing situations could help, Stoker said. “The order of prescribed closing procedures can be moved forward or backward depending on when information is available,” he added.

Most companies, from small businesses to publicly traded firms, have a month-end close process. If all goes well, the close is a routine process that does not attract much attention from management or business owners. But it’s a completely different story if the numbers are late—or wrong. To keep on top of your monthly accounting responsibilities and cut down on time spent closing your books, create a monthly financial calendar.

The monthly financial close is an important but time-consuming process that entrepreneurs don’t look forward to. During the first three business days of a month, two accounting periods are open in the general ledger . Special attention must be taken when processing transactions to ensure they are recorded in the correct accounting period/month. The month-end close checklist is a financial and operational review of your performance throughout the month. Ideally, some items on your checklist are related to your financial accounting system and some will be related to your management system . You want to close out a month so that you have a solid record of what happened during that month, with no chance of numbers moving around or shifting after the fact.

For example, you can use accounting software and scan your receipts in real-time to make your month-end a breeze. Routinely monitoring inventory levels will help you manage your working capital efficiently.

It also may be too late to correct issues by the time they are recognised. With all the moving pieces and time-sensitive data, automation software can help to lighten the manual load. Data automation tools like SolveXia collect data from various sources in seconds and match records. If an anomaly exists, SolveXia will notify its user on the spot so that it can be investigated and rectified. Finally, this information must then be transformed so that key decision holders, stakeholders, banks, investors and the like can have access to your company’s financial information.

Accurate financial information is the backbone of good business decision making and that means it is critical for executives to have timely access to reliable financial data. The financial close process is fundamental to that financial visibility.

Before you completely close the accounts at month-end, consider having a second set of eyes review your work. The person reviewing your accounting information could be a manager or supervisor who has experience handling your books. If you want to make sure your inventory is correct, you need to perform monthly inventory counts. Counting your inventory monthly allows you to accurately record inventory levels in your books at month-end. Plus, doing a monthly inventory count can help you decide what items you need to replenish and how frequently. If you haven’t reviewed the petty cash you’ve used, there’s a good chance that your month-end closures are incomplete and may skew the final results considerably depending on how much you rely on this method for transactions.