Depending on your organization’s accounting system, month end closing processes can be done in hand-written journals, computer spreadsheets or a full-blown accounting program. Update accounts payable, accounts receivable and other financial statements. Reconcile your bank statements with the general ledger entries for the period. This lets you know if there are any errors in your books or if money has been added or subtracted improperly by someone else who has access to them (like an employee).

• HighRadius’ Autonomous Accounting Solution gives real-time visibility into the different financial tasks and ensures activities that involve multiple stakeholders don’t get slowed down.
• Our solutions complement SAP software as part of an end-to-end offering for Finance & Accounting.
• Automated payment reconciliation, built-in employee debit cards, and seamless approvals can all be done using the power of Spendesk.
• Creating a view of where your money comes and goes each month enables you to build a clear picture of your overall business spending.

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. But accounting for every transaction is key to avoiding discrepancies in your financial data. Prepare a bank reconciliation to reconcile your bank account with your financial records.

How to Make the Most out of Report Automation & Dashboards

The majority of month-end activity involves cleaning up transactions that are still pending from iJournals, and processing incoming transactions. If you’ve been in accounting long enough, then you probably know how stressful it is to reach the year-end only to realize that there are errors in the books. Learn how to optimize existing processes, collaborate efficiently, and provide more value to your organization. With its comprehensive suite of features, Ramp offers a range of benefits to enhance your business’s close operations and financial management. 4.2 Incorporate new assets into the fixed asset sub-ledger or Excel worksheet, complete with all relevant details. 4.1 Scrutinize newly acquired fixed assets for accuracy and validate against internal capitalization policies and GL codes.

• A cloud-based solution that makes it easy for accounting firms to manage client work, collaborate with staff, and hit their deadlines.
• In this post, we’ll first give an overview of the closing process and provide you with a month-end close checklist.
• 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.
• The longer your bookkeeping takes, the staler the financial data gets, which hurts the accuracy of any forecast.
• The month-end close process is an accounting procedure where all of the previous month’s company transactions are accounted for.

And best of all, it can help prevent those dreaded last-minute scrambling sessions that often lead to mistakes. A month-end closing process should generally include the same steps each month. However, manually integrating data from different departments can present new challenges each time. Standardizing processes ensures accurate and consistent results month after month.

I tell my clients that you never want the stress of trying to remember everything that happened throughout the year to make any needed adjustments at year-end. For larger issues, you can use communication tools with specially set up groups or areas that strengthen collaboration and facilitate the exchange of information. All of this will help you avoid misunderstandings, clarify issues, and identify and counteract pitfalls early on. Delegate all tasks and responsibilities to the appropriate team members to evenly distribute the workload – and so that everyone on the team knows what needs to be done and by when. But creating one might take the time you would have used for other high-value tasks. To analyze the difference between the business’s total liabilities and assets by subtracting the client’s liabilities from their assets.

Review inventory

Plus, having accurate monthly reports makes your year-end close much simpler. The month-end close process is crucial for any business, but it’s also highly time-intensive. Building the right month-end closing process checklist helps your team members break out of the reporting silo and into a more strategic business performance report: what is it and how to write it business seat. Sticking to the same schedule for releasing financial statements every month can help you better organize your team’s time and activities. Adopting Autonomous Accounting Solutions like HighRadius’ can help you make day-zero financial close a reality through immediate and accurate decisions.

Steps in the Month-end Close Process

Not having access to information when needed makes it difficult to make decisions and plan for the future. A thorough review allows you to feel confident in your month-end close. If you find any errors or areas of concern–such as overspending within a specific department–address them right away. Plus, accurate monthly reporting makes year-end closing much easier to understand. Create a deadline to complete your closing procedures, depending on your business and your team’s workload.

This is what frees their time to not only close faster, but contribute to larger conversations around strategic business goals. These are some common ways to use SaaS accounting software, financial close software, and other tools to automate aspects of your month-end close process. Automation is the key to reducing the time and effort required for the month-end closing process. From collecting data to reconciling accounts, automation can speed up the workflows drastically.

Improves Results From Accurate Reporting

The goal is to show that the value of the assets and liabilities is true as they appear in your client’s balance sheet. Alternatively, take advantage of a software solution that pulls and harmonizes data between your client’s accounting software and the lender. Having a month-end close process in place ensures that your numbers are accurate and reliable.

Ready your reconcile accounts

Keeping track of revenue from product sales and services ensures that your business is on track with your forecasted ARR and sets you up for compliant tax filings later. You could also look at investing in automation solutions that support data aggregation and segmentation. HighRadius’ Autonomous Accounting Solution provides financial close automation which offers project templates, close task management, and accounting anomaly detection. All accounts on the balance sheet, like cash, savings, and checking, must be reconciled.

In many cases, those estimates are not materially different from the actuals. However, when it’s time to close the fiscal year, the actuals will need to be determined. That means that the year-end close will likely take at least an extra day or two. There’s a lot of pressure to get the books closed as fast as possible every month. Business owners and executives use last month’s financials as a starting point to make business decisions for the upcoming month. So the sooner they get final numbers, the sooner they can see what worked last month and what didn’t work so they can start making changes for the current month.

It helps in tax filing, preventing accounting errors, and getting an overall picture of the company’s cash flow scenario. Once the general ledger has been updated, the next step is to prepare the financial statements, which can be done either with compiled data in a spreadsheet or automation tools. Topics covered in these documents are typically a summary of the general ledger, profit and loss statements, and balance sheets.

1.1 Input all cash-related dealings into the General Ledger (GL) for the concluding financial cycle. Stay up to date on the latest corporate and high-level product developments at BlackLine. Rising labor costs and shifting expectations are contributing to unprecedented change in the labor market and altering the way companies and their executives think about talent management. Automate invoice processing to reduce manual invoicing costs, maintain compliance with e-invoicing regulations, and increase efficiency across your invoice-to-pay process.

Accelerate adoption and drive productivity and performance.One of the critical success drivers for any software technology is effective user training and adoption. Whether you are deploying for the first time or creating a sustainable education program for maximum value creation, explore how you can take the next steps to upskill your users. F&A leadership can have a significant impact by creating sustainable, scalable processes that can support the business before, during, and long after the IPO.

Automation also enables finance teams to review accounts ad hoc, speeding up the close process and reducing errors. Automation ensures data is consistent across departments and compliant with regulations. All these benefits result in improved accuracy, increased efficiency, and enhanced cost savings for organizations. The accounting team will reconcile cash accounts and balance sheets.