Period Close
Closing is a pyramid: the day close is its base, run every night by the branch; the month is a review layer on top of clean days; the year is a formality on top of clean months. Businesses that struggle at year-end are almost always missing the base, not the top.
Daily: the real close
The day close does the operational closing — cash counted against expected, consumption posted, exceptions surfaced and journaled. A business whose days close cleanly has already done most of what "period close" means anywhere else. This is by design: push the discipline to where the knowledge is, the same night.
Monthly: the review layer
No button closes a month; a routine does:
- Every day of the month closed, with no unresolved consumption failures (the day close history shows this at a glance).
- Vouchers complete — the shoebox emptied, approval queues cleared.
- Bank reconciliations done for every account.
- Aging reviewed — receivables chased, payables scheduled.
- Trial balance read — not audited, read: does anything surprise you? Surprises found monthly are anecdotes; found yearly, they're projects.
Yearly: the lock
The financial year boundary is the one hard lock: once the year is finalized with your accountant, manual vouchers dated into it are refused, and corrections live in the new year with clear references. Before finalizing: all twelve monthly routines done, year-end stock counted (a full stock reconciliation dated to the boundary), and the accountant's adjustments — depreciation, write-offs, accruals — entered as their journal entries.
What "closed" means here: days lock operationally as they close; the year locks the ledger by date. The month between them is deliberately a discipline rather than a mechanism — flexible while you need it, finished when the routine says so.