What a monthly close should include

A close is the monthly ritual that turns raw books into numbers you can act on. Here is what a complete one contains, how fast it should land, and the signs yours is broken.

The five things a complete close delivers

1. Reconciled accounts. Every bank, card, and loan balance tied to a statement. If the cash number is soft, everything downstream of it is soft. This is the unglamorous step that makes the rest worth reading.

2. Revenue and margin by line. Not one blended number. You price, staff, and sell by service line or product line, so you should read results the same way. A blended margin can hold steady while your best line quietly shrinks.

3. Variance with a reason. Plan against actual, and a sentence for every gap that matters. A number without a why is trivia. The sentence is the part a spreadsheet cannot give you.

4. Cash, forward looking. Where cash stands today and where it goes over the next quarter, week by week. Monthly cash summaries hide the week that hurts. That view has its own page: the 13-week cash flow forecast, explained.

5. A decision list. What the month is telling you to do, in priority order, each item citing the numbers that produced it. This usually arrives as a one-page memo: here is what board-ready looks like.

Three signs your close is broken

The numbers change after the close. Last month's revenue should be a fact, not a draft. If figures move after the package ships, the reconciliation step is being skipped.

The package is a spreadsheet nobody opens. Volume is not clarity. If it takes an hour to find the story, the story goes unfound, and the close becomes a filing exercise.

You learn about a bad month from the bank balance. That is the close arriving too late to matter, whatever the calendar says.

Who should run it

Your bookkeeper keeps the books. The close sits on top: it checks the books, reads them, and turns them into decisions. The boundary is firm: we work from read-only access, your bookkeeper posts every entry, we flag the reconciling items we find, and we never write to your ledger. That second layer is what ClarIQ runs as the Business Accelerator: a live dashboard synced to your books, the close on a fixed rhythm, the cash forecast, and the monthly memo, working on top of QuickBooks or Xero. You can see a sample memo before you talk to anyone.