Month-end close for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — month-end close is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside bookkeeping & accounting more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for month-end close — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Month-end close sits inside bookkeeping & accounting, alongside Monthly bookkeeping, Catch-up bookkeeping, Bank reconciliation. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

Reconciliation confirms every transaction matches the bank statement. A close goes further: it posts accrual entries for costs incurred but not yet billed, spreads prepaid expenses over the periods they cover, and defers revenue collected ahead of delivery. Without those entries, a reconciled ledger can still misstate the period.

A moving close date means the P&L you are looking at on any given day could reflect last month or something older — nobody can tell without checking. A fixed date, held every period, means management, the CPA, and any lender always know exactly what period a set of numbers represents.

Cash collected for work not yet delivered is booked to a deferred revenue liability, not to income. We maintain a schedule for each contract showing what has been recognized and what remains deferred, and release the balance on the delivery schedule rather than the cash-receipt date.

They post to a prepaid asset account when paid, then release to expense in equal monthly amounts over the period the payment actually covers. That keeps a single large payment from distorting one month's P&L while the following eleven months look artificially clean.

We accrue the estimated liability at close based on the purchase order, contract rate, or prior billing pattern, so the expense lands in the period the work happened. Once the actual invoice arrives, we true up the estimate to the real figure.

Standing recurring entries (prepaid releases, lease and depreciation amortization), accruals for known but unbilled obligations, deferred revenue releases, a reconciliation-complete check for every account, and a flux review against the prior period — run in the same order every month.

A P&L, balance sheet, and cash position, delivered on the fixed close date, along with a short flux note explaining what moved from the prior period and why. It is internal management reporting, not a CPA-issued financial statement with an opinion attached.

Your CPA builds the 1120, 1120-S, or 1065 from the accumulated year of closes. If accruals, prepayments, and deferred revenue were handled consistently every month, the CPA starts from numbers that were already true — instead of reconstructing several months of missed entries before the return can begin.

A short explanation of what changed materially from the prior period and why — a jump in accrued liabilities, a release of deferred revenue, an unusual prepaid adjustment. We include one with every close so a number that moves has a reason attached, not a question left hanging.

Yes. The tax basis your CPA elects for the return is a filing decision; it does not have to match how the internal books are kept. Closing to accrual gives you a P&L and balance sheet that are comparable month to month and useful for actually running the business, independent of which basis ends up on the return.

AI tools flag accounts that moved outside their normal range and surface which standing entries — lease amortization, prepaid releases, recurring accruals — are due that period, so nothing gets missed because a person forgot. The named accountable person on the engagement decides what actually posts, reviews the flux note, and signs off on the closing package before it goes out. AI does not post an entry, close a period, or decide what the flux note says.

The fixed close date holds for the standard package; a one-time event that needs its own accounting treatment — purchase price allocation, a fundraise's deferred costs — is scoped as additional work rather than pushed into the regular close, so the recurring date for everyone else's numbers does not slip because of one unusual month.