Month-end close still feels like a race against the clock for many finance teams.
You’re pulling data from multiple systems to reconcile reports—a pain when those systems don’t integrate seamlessly. You’re chasing Sales for expense reports, HR for payroll journals and Procurement to verify vendor invoices. Then you’re checking with AP and AR to make sure they’ve closed their subledgers.
It can be a mad dash to compile all the data you need. You're left scrambling through spreadsheets, email threads and last-minute messages to piece everything together.
It’s no wonder, then, that a quick close is so hard to achieve. While many finance professionals may aim for a three-day monthly close, data from Ledge shows that 50% actually take six days or more.
But one of the reasons your month-end close feels so chaotic may be because you don’t have a clear checklist in place of all of the tasks needed to complete it efficiently—with defined ownership of who’s responsible for each item.
This guide gives you that, breaking down each step to help you close faster every month, avoid surprises and deliver financials your leadership team can trust.
At a high level, a month-end close is the process of reviewing and finalizing your company’s financial activity for the previous month. This typically includes tasks such as reconciling accounts, reviewing journal entries, posting accruals and producing accurate financial reports.
The ultimate goal for the close process each month is to ensure that every transaction is recorded, and your numbers reflect the company’s true financial position.
This kind of consistency also sets you up for a smoother year-end close.
However, anyone (like you) who has been through the process knows: month-end close is a cross-functional effort that depends on receiving clean data from multiple systems and teams on time. As a result, it only takes one late accrual, missing invoice or unapproved journal entry to throw off the entire process, and suddenly you’re days behind, trying to close the gap before deadline.
The checklist below should help your finance team streamline the process, reduce the risk of delays and give your entire organization numbers they can trust, month after month.
To make your month-end close process easier, we’ve organized all the steps into three clear phases: pre-close, close execution and post-close.
Each phase is broken down so that your team knows what to do, when to do it and why it matters for both the current month and the goals you’re working toward throughout the year.
This phase sets the stage for a smooth and accurate month-end close. It typically involves prepping your systems, aligning stakeholders and collecting all key inputs, so your finance and accounting team isn’t scrambling mid-close trying to fill in the gaps.
While some teams skip or rush through this phase, it’s where a successful close really begins. Done well, it introduces predictability, reduces errors and keeps the rest of the process on track.
A successful month-end close starts with accurate, up-to-date data.
If your ERP, payroll or billing tools haven’t pushed their latest numbers into your reporting environment, everything from journal entries to reconciliations will be off.
That’s why, before close execution begins, you need to make sure your core systems are fully synced and feeding clean, complete data into your templates.
For many finance teams, that still means manually updating data from different sources. According to Ledge, 94% of teams still use Excel to drive their month-end close processes—something 50% cite as a key reason their close is so slow.
A financial close management software that automates consolidation and keeps everything on a centralized system can help.
Vena, for example, connects directly to your ERP, payroll and billing systems (such as NetSuite, ADP and Stripe) and pulls actuals into a familiar Excel interface, allowing your team to move quickly without needing to learn new tools to get the job done.
Plus, built-in validation rules flag issues like unbalanced accounts, incomplete records or discrepancies between expected and actual numbers, so you can catch and resolve problems early, not midway through the process.
A common reason the month-end close gets delayed is that Finance is waiting on other teams, whether it's overdue expense reports, open purchase orders or missing documentation.
After all, you can’t accrue what hasn’t been submitted or reconcile what hasn’t been approved. And if a team misses the window, the ripple effect hits your whole close process.
That’s why it’s critical to stay ahead of these blockers by proactively reminding department heads beforehand to submit all pending expenses, approvals and supporting documentation.
If you already use Vena, for example, its built-in workflows automate reminders and streamline handoffs, so you don’t have to send email reminders manually.
Using this feature, you can:
Assign close-related tasks to department heads, such as “Submit final accruals” or “Review open POs” and link each to a relevant template within Vena.
Trigger automatic reminders when tasks are assigned, due or overdue, so department heads stay on track without constant follow-ups from finance.
Track submission status in real time through the dashboard, so you can see which teams have submitted their inputs and which are holding things up.
This helps you avoid the last-minute scramble and keeps the entire close on schedule.
Even the most experienced finance teams can lose momentum during the month-end close if task ownership and deadlines are not clearly communicated.
That’s why you need a central schedule that clearly outlines:
Tasks (e.g., revenue recognition, reconciliations, variance reviews)
Owners (who’s responsible for what)
Due dates and dependencies
Include all critical activities from this checklist, like reconciling bank and credit accounts, and organize them in a timeline using Excel or your project management tool. Then assign task owners, set deadlines and include context where needed.
Pro Tip: Name your schedule something like “[Company] Close Tracker – [Month] 2025” and attach a short one-pager outlining escalation paths, backup approvers and final sign-off roles. It’s a small step that saves time and reduces confusion under pressure.
Alternatively, if you use Vena, you can map the entire close process directly in the platform. The drag-and-drop workflow designer makes it easy to visually lay out each task, assign owners, set dependencies and trigger automations.
From there, you can track progress in real time, seeing what’s complete, what’s overdue and what’s at risk, so your team always knows where things stand.
This is the core of the month-end close, where your team records revenue, reconciles accounts and ensures every number checks out before reports are finalized.
Nailing this phase ensures your numbers hold up under scrutiny, as a single error can delay reporting and even raise red flags for auditors and leadership.
One of the biggest risks at this stage is incomplete revenue capture. If invoices haven’t been issued, sales data hasn’t synced into the ERP or deferred revenue hasn’t been recognized, your numbers will be inaccurate, and correcting them later can be time consuming.
Before you finalize the close, confirm that:
All invoices for the period are accounted for
Revenue is recognized according to your accounting policy
Credits, discounts and reversals are properly reflected
Most of this information needed for this step can be found on your income statement. You can use a free income statement template as a base and create a new tab within the same Excel workbook to track revenue completeness.
Unbilled expenses, such as services rendered but not yet invoiced, vendor work in progress or pending reimbursements, can distort your financial statements if not captured before the close.
To prevent this:
Scan for unbilled activity across departments, including marketing, consulting and contractors.
Pull documentation like timesheets, contracts, POs or SOWs to validate each expense.
Estimate the accrued amounts based on timing, rates and the scope of services.
Post accrual entries to the GL, tagging them with the appropriate codes and cost centers.
You can create a dedicated Unbilled Expenses tab in Excel to provide department heads with a structured, repeatable method for submitting pending costs prior to close.
Your goal here is to confirm that all deposits, payments, fees and transfers have been accurately recorded and to explain any discrepancies between your GL and your bank statements.
To achieve this:
Confirm that all transactions in your bank/credit card statements appear in the GL
Investigate timing differences (e.g., pending ACH transfers, unreconciled checks)
Flag unexpected transactions or amounts that require clarification
If you’re using Vena for Account Reconciliation, you get access to pre-built templates and smart tools to help you reduce your reconciliation time. With these templates, you can:
Pull in general ledger data
Help match it to your bank and credit card statements
Flag timing differences and variances automatically
Track each review and approval step with a full audit trail
You can also add custom fields, such as beginning and ending balances, variance explanations and reviewer notes, ensuring your close remains accurate and audit-ready.
This step involves reviewing outstanding bills and invoices, as well as vendor and customer payments, to confirm that they are accurately recorded in the subledgers and reflected in the GL.
If these accounts aren’t reconciled properly, you risk misstating what your company owes vendors and suppliers or what customers owe your business. And this directly affects your balance sheet, cash flow forecasts and audit readiness.
This is where automation comes in handy. Account reconciliation software like Vena can automatically match entries, flag discrepancies and reduce manual workload, so your accounting team focuses only on exceptions that truly need attention.
You also get access to a Reconciliation Dashboard, which offers a real-time view of account statuses. It shows which accounts are fully reconciled, which are still in progress and which require escalation, giving your team more visibility and accountability during close.
At this stage, your goal is to ensure every journal entry is complete, accurate and properly reviewed before it’s posted to the general ledger. This includes recurring entries (like payroll and depreciation), accruals, reclasses and any manual adjustments.
A best practice here is to define a clear separation of duties: the preparer enters the journal, a second reviewer validates the details and a third party (typically a controller or lead) approves the entry. This structure reduces the risk of errors or fraud and increases audit confidence.
If you're using Vena’s Account Reconciliation solution, you also get access to a Journal Entry Dashboard that provides real-time visibility into all journal entries, including what’s been submitted, what’s pending approval and what’s been posted.
Once submitted, entries follow a structured approval workflow with full audit tracking, capturing who prepared, reviewed and approved each entry, along with the corresponding dates. This centralized process improves transparency, streamlines reviews and helps your team stay compliant without having to track entries across multiple spreadsheets or systems.
During the month-end close, collect and verify all relevant payroll documents for the current period, including payroll registers, adjustment logs, bonus approvals and benefit summaries. If any changes occurred during the month, such as new hires, compensation updates or benefit changes, confirm that they were processed correctly and are reflected in the general ledger.
Finally, reconcile payroll data against your general ledger and reports from your third-party payroll provider (such as ADP). This ensures that payroll-related expenses are accurately recorded and match what's been reported to tax authorities or paid out to employees.
Fixed assets, such as equipment, IT infrastructure, property or vehicles, require special attention during the close process. These assets follow specific depreciation schedules and involve capital expenditures, repairs, disposals or impairments that need to be accurately recorded.
You can automate the entire process using the Fixed Asset Reconciliation Schedule, a pre-built template available within the Account Reconciliation solution in Vena.
It helps your team:
Reconcile fixed asset balances across the GL and subledgers
Track monthly depreciation and accumulated depreciation
Document changes like capital additions, write-downs or disposals
Route entries through review and approval workflows with full audit tracking
Even with the best checklists and templates in place, month-end close rarely goes perfectly to plan.
That’s why holding a mid-close sync—typically halfway through your scheduled close window—is a great way to catch issues early and realign everyone before the pressure builds.
This quick touchpoint helps the team:
Review which tasks are completed, in progress or blocked
Identify where inputs are still missing or incorrect
Clarify any confusion around entries, documentation or sign-offs
Re-prioritize tasks to get back on schedule if needed
Vena supports this step by giving you real-time visibility into the entire close process through its workflow dashboard. You can instantly see task status, ownership and outstanding actions without chasing updates across spreadsheets or email threads.
Even with accurate entries, your close isn’t audit-ready until material transactions are backed by supporting documents, like invoices, signed approvals or contracts.
Vena makes this easy by letting you attach source files directly within the platform. Each upload is securely stored, time stamped and user-tracked for full traceability. That way, you’re not scrambling during audits or leadership reviews.
This is where your team turns numbers into insights. It involves updating actuals in reporting tools, reviewing key variances and sharing reports with leadership and stakeholders.
Some finance teams drop the ball here, not because it’s less important, but because most of the energy goes into closing the books for the month.
In fact, Vena’s 2025 State of Strategic Finance Report found that 19% of finance leaders cited a lack of time for this type of planning as their biggest reported challenge, because routine processes like monthly close are taking up too much time.
However, this phase is where your work delivers the most value. It’s where your leadership team and other departments use the data from the close to form insights and make informed decisions going forward.
This step ensures that your dashboards, variance reports, forecasts and board decks are all based on the same trusted numbers.
Even if you’ve already synced data sources earlier in the process, you still need to finalize actuals and confirm consistency across your reporting and planning tools.
With Vena, actuals flow directly from your ERP or GL system into your Excel-based reporting and forecasting templates. Everything updates automatically, so your team is always working from the same source of truth, and leadership can get timely insights without the wait.
Once actuals are finalized, your next priority is explaining the “why” behind the numbers.
Leadership doesn’t just want to see what changed. They want to understand why it happened, what it means and whether they should be concerned.
This step involves flagging significant deviations between budget, forecast and actuals, then turning those differences into clear, actionable commentary.
But this kind of investigation can be time consuming, especially when you're juggling multiple stakeholders or last-minute report prep. AI agents like Vena Copilot can make this easier by allowing you to interrogate your data with natural language and provide a helpful starting point.
You can prompt the AI to scan finalized actuals, analyze historical trends, highlight key variances, optimize forecasts and draft commentary based on prior inputs or common business drivers. It also allows your team, including executives, to ask questions in natural language about reports or data and receive accurate responses grounded in your existing spreadsheets and models.
You still review and approve the final output, but instead of starting from a blank slate, you’re refining the AI-generated insights, which saves your team time and reduces back and forth.
Your month-end close process isn’t truly complete until you reflect on what worked, what didn’t and what needs to change before next month. This final step is an opportunity to reflect, identify patterns and continually improve how your team closes the books.
Reflect on:
What got delayed
Where bottlenecks happened
Who needed extra follow-ups
Which entries were reworked or questioned
Use these insights to identify potential friction points and log recurring issues, such as blockers, missed deadlines or workaround dependencies.
Over time, this process helps you tighten controls, automate repetitive tasks and create a smoother, more predictable closing process.
A faster, more predictable month-end close is the result of clearly defined processes, consistent collaboration and the right tools to keep everything moving.
Financial close software, such as Vena, helps finance and accounting teams streamline each step, from syncing systems and tracking accruals to reviewing variances and distributing reports.
Instead of chasing updates or stitching together data across multiple spreadsheets, your team works from a single source of truth that updates in real time. This way, your team spends less time fixing errors and more time focusing on strategic tasks.
Tanger Outlets used Vena to reduce their month-end close from nine days to just four and a half days. Before Vena, their team struggled with scattered data, delayed approvals and limited visibility into what was slowing things down.
By using Vena’s workflow dashboard to view task statuses in real time, they were able to identify blockers earlier, reassign work as needed and ensure nothing fell through the cracks.
Month-end close happens 12 times a year and focuses on timely reporting, reconciliations and forecasts. Year-end close is more detailed. It wraps up the full fiscal year, supports audits and tax filings and includes final adjustments, such as retained earnings and deferred taxes.
A successful month-end close is a cross-functional effort, with finance and accounting teams owning and coordinating the process.
Accounting handles reconciliations and journal entries, and ensures the accuracy of the GL.
FP&A uses actuals to update forecasts and prepare reports.
Department heads submit final expenses, review budget-to-actuals and provide input on variances.
Payroll, HR, procurement and occasionally RevOps feed critical data into the process, such as payroll entries, benefit costs and vendor payments.
A smooth and timely close benefits every team that relies on financial data to make decisions:
FP&A: Needs clean actuals early to perform variance analysis, update forecasts and prepare board materials.
Accounting: Gains consistency, reduces rework and is better prepared for audits and year-end reporting.
Executive leadership: Relies on accurate financials to guide strategic decisions around hiring, investment and performance.
Department heads: Use monthly reports to manage spending, track progress toward goals and make course corrections as necessary.
Investors and the board: Expect reliable and timely reporting. Delays or inconsistencies can raise red flags about controls.
There’s no universal benchmark, but in general, it takes 5–7 business days for high-performing finance teams and 8–10 business days for mid-sized companies. More than 10 days typically indicates opportunities to introduce further automation into your workflows, which accelerates the process by automating handoffs, task tracking and variance analysis.
Here are a few best practices that help teams close faster and with fewer errors:
Start early: Don’t wait until Day 1 of close. Instead, use a pre-close checklist to sync systems and gather inputs in advance.
Use a detailed close calendar: Assign task owners, deadlines and dependencies so everyone knows what’s expected and when.
Automate wherever possible: Integrate systems and standardize templates to reduce manual copy-paste and data validation.
Hold mid-close check-ins: A short sync can surface blockers early and realign priorities if you’re falling behind.
Document and improve: After every close, note recurring issues and update your process to prevent repeat problems.
AI tools like Vena Copilot help FP&A teams spot variances, draft commentary and speed up reporting. Instead of spending hours on manual analysis, your team can focus on final review and strategy.