Month-end accounts checklist

Closing off the financial period correctly at the end of every month is vital. It also delivers practical benefits both for the Finance team and the business. Month-end is a focused opportunity to check the accounts are accurate and up-to-date and enable any discrepancies to be identified and corrected promptly. As well as being good business practice, it also ensures other important Finance tasks such as tax management and year-end run smoothly too.

There are a host of key steps to completing month-end accounts effectively. Use the month-end accounts checklist below to ensure your team has everything covered. You can also download the month-end checklist to tick off as you go along.

Download month-end checklist

5 minutes

Written by The Access Group

10 step month-end accounts checklist

Streamline your month-end closing process with this comprehensive 10-step accounts checklist:

Close outstanding purchase orders (POs): Efficiently match POs with invoices, approving payments or cancelling unused POs.
Process accounts payable: Code and prepare supplier invoices, staff expenses, and other outgoings for prompt weekly payments.
Send sales invoices promptly: Stay on top of incoming sales invoices to ensure accurate month-end balancing.
Reconcile aged debtors and creditors: Run reports to identify overdue payments and discrepancies between income and trial balance.
Complete banking tasks: Conduct monthly petty cash count and log all banking activities, including credit card payments, followed by generating a comprehensive report.
Monitor fixed assets: Keep your fixed-asset register up-to-date with regular monitoring.
Reconcile income: Verify that your income totals align with monthly remittance advice slips.
Reconcile VAT: Double-check entries for accuracy before submission, ensuring the VAT control account matches the total on your VAT claim.
Reconcile payroll: Report any payroll errors to your provider, and confirm that the balance on the control account matches unpaid payments for the latest payroll cycle.
Produce comprehensive month-end reports: Include a trial balance, income and expenditure account, cash flow statement, and balance sheet in your reports.

Reviewing and closing the financial period at month-end provides you with the opportunity to assess business progress and keep track of profitability, cashflow, and performance.

It’s also good to think creatively about what could make month-end easier. For example introducing cut-off dates for invoices or expenses makes it clear to the whole business what their responsibilities are and how they can help.

A consistent approach also makes it easier when staff leave and new people start as the expectations are clear.

Download our month-end checklist so you can easily tick off each step at the end of every month.

Think about how accounting software might help too. Producing reports, analysing data, even populating documents with finance information can all be done much more easily. Ultimately, with the right tools and processes in place, your month-end close can be smooth and stress free.

Explore our financial year end hub and discover a host of useful information including tips and best practice for Finance teams, year-end guidance and tools, as well as insight into key priorities and trends for the coming year.

For month end we work to a very strict timetable. Using the old system it was very difficult to meet those timescales. With Access Financials, we can now do month end in a day and a half, which gives us an extra two and a half days to analyse the figures and make sure everything’s accurate before we consolidate the information to KLM/Air France on the fifth working day. So, it’s just freeing up our time to do other things, to analyse the data rather than just number crunching.

Andy Skitt Finance Manager at KLM UK Engineering