Month-End Account Closing How-To

More than 4,000 companies of all sizes, across all industries, trust BlackLine to help them modernize their financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes. To sustain timely performance of daily activities, banking and financial services organizations are turning to modern accounting and finance practices. It’s no longer a matter of whether or not to digitally transform. Like all business processes, the month-end closing process has the potential to help your company thrive, or hinder its growth and success. Month-end close is an essential process that can be refined and streamlined to achieve maximum efficacy with minimum error, waste, and disruption. Invest in developing a fully integrated software environment to slash the “grunt work” of tedious manual workflows and eliminate obstacles like rogue spend, fraud, and human error.

• HighRadius’ Autonomous Accounting can help your business make the month-end closing process faster, smoother, and error-free.
• Learn about common procedures regarding month-end and quarterly book closing in this guide.
• Sub-ledgers break down the details that won’t be found in the general ledger.
• Disorganized accounting sources – invoices and other accounting documents are in various formats and in various repositories, which makes consolidation complex.
• The same concept can be applied to companies and their financial performance.

All credit card & bank charges have to be posted in relevant month and most of the discrepancies with bank should be sorted out within time period. This is very important from collection point of view as long pending discrepancies become very difficult to resolve. Mortgage, replacement reserves, tax escrow and insurance escrow are reconciled to lending statements construction bookkeeping issued by lender every month. Other reconciliations include reconciling AP and AR balances to specific sub ledgers/aging reports, security deposit balances to specific tenants’ reports etc. This necessary financial reporting process consists of collecting, cleaning, and organizing financial data for a specific closing period to see how the company is performing.

What is the month-end close?

Emma’s 70-person geographically distributed accounting team improved internal controls and streamlined the audit thanks to FloQast. In post-close meetings, discuss what worked and what didn’t, and review assigned roles and responsibilities for the next month. Review any lessons learned, any variances or abnormalities, and entertain any proposed changes to the process. Like all deadlines, the month-end close can be a source of tension for some organizations. However, with proper preparation and systems in place, it is a source of reliable information and a sound business practice. Global and regional advisory and consulting firms bring deep finance domain expertise, process transformation leadership, and shared passion for customer value creation to our joint customers.

It may be best to check this fund weekly to keep track of your small payments. The more times you go through the month-end close process, the better you’ll understand what steps to take and how to work more efficiently in the future. Depending on the size of your company and the number of monthly transactions, you may find it difficult—if not impossible—to record transactions as they come to you. You still need a system for organizing and maintaining accurate records.

Reconcile All Accounts

Now that you’ve added adjusting entries, you can generate an adjusted trial balance for month-end accounting. Similar to your preliminary trial balance, your adjusted trial balance should also show your debits and credits to be identical. A preliminary, pre-closing, https://www.good-name.org/how-accounting-services-can-help-real-estate-companies-optimize-their-finances/ or unadjusted trial balance is the sum of your general ledger account balances before you add adjusting entries. As you check off items, the ending difference will get closer to $0. Once you’ve checked off and verified every transaction, select Finish now and Done.

HighRadius’ Autonomous Accounting can help your business make the month-end closing process faster, smoother, and error-free. Its AI-powered transaction detection system gives access to real-time data and helps spot errors. It also automates manual tasks like financial data collection and reconciliation. Month-end closing is among the most critical accounting processes for every business.