Month-End Close Made Easy: Best Practices, Checklist & AI Readiness Tips
What Is the Month-End Close—and Why It Matters
Picture this: It’s the end of the month, and the finance team is juggling spreadsheets, emails, and late-breaking expenses, racing the clock to finalize the books. That’s the month-end close in action—a critical but often chaotic time when accounting teams work to reconcile accounts, analyze variances, and deliver accurate financial reports before the new month begins.
The month-end close process ensures your business has a clear, accurate view of its financial health. Whether you’re preparing for board meetings, audits, or just trying to stay on top of performance, a timely and accurate financial close is key. But with growing volumes of data, tight deadlines, and manual tasks, closing the books can feel like a marathon every month, often leaving accounting teams unable to focus on anything else. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know—from how the month-end close works to tools that can make it faster and easier. Think of it as your go-to resource for mastering financial reporting, streamlining reconciliations, using purpose-built financial close software, and getting your team AI ready.
Month-End Close Process, Step-By-Step
The month-end close isn’t just about checking boxes—it’s about ensuring your financial data is accurate, complete, and ready for reporting. Here’s a straightforward look at the key steps involved in a typical month-end close process:
1. Collect and Analyze All Transactions
As transactions occur throughout the month, ensure they are all entered into your system in a timely manner to avoid delays while closing the books. This includes sales, purchases, payroll, expense reports, bank transactions, and journal entries.
2. Reconcile Accounts
Reconcile key accounts—such as cash, bank statements, credit cards, accounts payable (AP), and accounts receivable (AR). Make sure subledgers (like AR, AP, inventory, or fixed assets) tie back to your general ledger. Reconciliation helps ensure your records match external documents, which is critical for spotting discrepancies or fraud.
3. Review and Adjust Journal Entries
Review journal entries for accuracy and completeness. You may need to make adjusting entries for accruals, deferrals, depreciation, or corrections. These adjustments ensure that revenues and expenses are recognized in the correct accounting period.
4. Perform Variance Analysis
Compare actual results to budgets or prior periods to identify and explain variances. This analysis can uncover trends, misclassifications, or performance issues—and it’s often a key step in preparing for financial reporting and stakeholder reviews.
Read More: “Guide to Variance Analysis in the Month-End Close”
5. Prepare Financial Statements
Once reconciliations and adjustments are complete, generate your financial reports. This includes the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. These reports provide a snapshot of your organization’s financial health and performance.
6. Review and Approve
Have senior accountants, controllers, or finance leaders review the financials for accuracy, completeness, and compliance with accounting standards. Approval ensures accountability before data is shared externally or used in decision-making.
7. Close the Books
Once everything is reviewed and approved, officially close the books for the month. This locks in the data and prevents further changes. Many teams document this in a month-end close checklist or within their month-end close software.
Common Month-End Close Mistakes & Bottlenecks
If your accounting close process feels more like a fire drill than a well-oiled machine, you’re not alone. Here are a few common mistakes and bottlenecks that disrupt the accounting month-end close, and how your team can overcome them.
Inconsistent Processes
The problem:
When individuals or regions don’t follow a consistent process to close the books, the process becomes difficult to manage or improve and confidence in the numbers suffers.
The fix:
Develop and enforce a repeatable, documented accounting month-end close workflow. Trintech helps enforce consistency with templates, checklists, and global policies—ensuring every accounting month-end close follows the same proven path.
Incomplete Data & Manual Records Retrieval
The problem:
When data lives in disconnected systems—or must be manually pulled from emails or spreadsheets—retrieving accurate, complete records becomes a bottleneck.
The fix:
Integrate systems where possible and automate data pulls. Create shared folders or dashboards for required inputs to reduce back-and-forth and data loss. Better yet, Trintech integrates with ERPs, subledgers, and other systems to automatically collect and validate financial data for month-end reporting.
Reliance on Spreadsheets & Manual Records
The problem:
Manual spreadsheets are error-prone, hard to audit, and lack version control. As your accounting close process scales, spreadsheets break down.
The fix:
Automate workflows and standardize documentation with purpose-built tools, like Trintech’s financial close software. Trintech replaces error-prone spreadsheets with automated processes and built-in controls, giving you accuracy, traceability, and peace of mind during audits.
Check out our blog, “Avoid These Mistakes in Your Month-End Close Process” for more common bottlenecks that may be plaguing your accounting close process and learn how Trintech’s financial close software can help.
Month-End Close Checklist & Its Purpose
When you’re closing the books, details matter—and missing one can throw off your entire financial picture. That’s why a month-end close checklist is essential. It’s a repeatable framework that ensures every step is tracked, assigned, and completed on time.
A good checklist creates structure and accountability. It helps prevent missed tasks, ensures compliance, and reduces last-minute scrambles. For more complex month-end close processes, a checklist can help you remember where to look as you aggregate data from multiple sources to prepare financial statements. As your team grows or responsibilities shift, it also promotes consistency and makes onboarding easier.
Start by mapping your process and assigning clear ownership. For even better accountability and insights, use close management software to monitor progress and easily pinpoint bottlenecks.
How Long Does the Month-End Close Take?
The time required to complete the month-end close process has long been a challenge for finance and accounting teams, and it varies widely depending on the size of the organization, the complexity of its financial operations, and—critically—whether the close is performed manually or with automation software.
Month-end close time is a key metric for every accounting team out there and many top consulting firms like PwC and KPMG regularly track and release reports on the average duration of the month-end close for benchmarking purposes.
Month-End Close Benchmarks
Average time to close is 6 days, according to multiple studies, with the fastest organizations closing in 3 days and the slowest closing 8+ days
While most organizations have less than 40% of their close process automated, Ventana reports that wide-scale automation reduces close time by 40-50%
Companies leveraging financial close software report an average of 2-3 days faster close time
Manual vs. Automated Close Timelines
| Process Type | Average Duration | Challenges & Benefits |
|---|---|---|
| Manual (Spreadsheets) | 7-10+ business days | Prone to errors, high reconciliation effort, time-consuming consolidations |
| Automated (Close Software) | 3-5 business days | Streamlined workflows, real-time data access, reduced manual effort |
Financial close software offers many benefits, like significantly reducing the close time by eliminating redundant tasks like manual reconciliations, journal entry logging, and data gathering across systems. It also improves accuracy and provides audit readiness, reducing the need for rework.
Is Your Month-End Close AI-Ready?
Shortening the financial close cycle isn’t just about speed—it’s about agility and accuracy. A faster close allows CFOs and controllers to shift from reporting the past to proactively planning for the future. Automating your financial close is a huge step towards expediting and improving the process, but today, many finance teams are taking things a step further by implementing AI in their financial close. However, wanting to use AI and being ready to use AI are two different things.
How is AI Financial Close Different from Automation?
Traditional automation follows static rules. AI Financial Close uses learning algorithms to adapt over time, prioritize risk, detect anomalies, and proactively perform processes and assist users throughout the close process. AI Financial Close combines artificial intelligence and automation—providing insights, making suggestions, and learning from historical data. It elevates automation from task execution to preparing the financial close end-to-end.
How Do Accounting Teams Get AI-Ready?
One of the foundational steps in preparing for AI integration is ensuring data cleanliness. Clean, well-structured data is essential for AI systems to function correctly and provide accurate insights.
3 Tips for Accounting AI Readiness
Ensure data is clean and well structured by eliminating duplicates and errors, standardizing account names, codes, etc. and centralizing data sources for better accessibility.
Leaders must act as data stewards to ensure data is accessible, accurate and secure for AI usage, but everyone must understand their part in ensuring data integrity.
While teams will need training on AI tools and automation workflows, when it comes to analyzing the outputs, accountants already have many AI-adjacent skills.
Accelerate Your Month-End Close with Trintech’s AI Financial Close Software
Trintech’s AI financial close software redefines the speed, accuracy, and control of your month-end close. By automating reconciliations, journal entries, and close tasks—and enhancing them with AI insights—finance teams can shift from reactive to proactive.
AI-powered anomaly detection, risk scoring, and intelligent task prioritization help identify issues earlier, focus team efforts where they matter most, and reduce errors before they impact reporting. Real-time dashboards provide transparency and control across every stage of the close, driving accountability and eliminating bottlenecks.
With scalable solutions for both mid-size companies and global enterprises, Trintech enables smarter, faster, and more confident financial closes—freeing your team to focus on strategic work.
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Month-End Close Success Stories
Severn Trent
Breaking the Excel Barrier: How Severn Trent Standardized Its Financial Close Process with Trintech
Severn Trent, one of the UK’s largest water companies, faced major challenges with standardization and visibility across dozens of entities in their month-end close process. By implementing Trintech’s software, they streamlined reconciliations, journal entries, and access controls, resulting in higher quality financial reporting and improved team efficiency. Reflecting on the most recent close, Jason Clough, Financial Systems Analyst at Severn Trent, shared: “100% of our tasks were completed on time, with nearly everyone out the door by 5pm. That’s what Trintech has enabled us to accomplish.” The automation has also enhanced work-life balance and set the stage for future innovations, including AI-driven reconciliations.
Utah Community Credit Union
How Utah Community Credit Union Gained Efficiency and Reduced Costs with Automated Reconciliation
Utah Community Credit Union (UCCU) transformed its heavily manual reconciliation process by implementing Trintech’s software, resulting in substantial efficiency gains and reduced costs. Justin Smith, CFO of UCCU, shared, “Our month-end close processes used to take up to eight days. That’s been reduced by at least two days—another great time savings.” The credit union’s most complicated accounts was the Federal Reserve, which once took up to 6 hours a day to reconcile. With Trintech it’s done in 30 minutes. Additionally, automation eliminated the need to fill three FTE roles despite 70% asset growth.
Genesis Systems
Gaining Full Oversight and Control Over the Month-End Close Process
After being acquired by a public company, Genesis Systems needed to overhaul its manual and inconsistent month-end close process to meet stricter regulatory standards. By implementing Trintech’s software, the finance team gained real-time visibility, eliminated redundant manual tracking, and improved both morale and efficiency across global entities. Diane Foss, Director of Finance, noted: “We used to have a 15-minute meeting with 8 people those first three days of month end… Now I click on a button and can see a dashboard of the status in real-time.” Trintech’s automation and flexibility helped streamline onboarding, support remote work, and provide peace of mind that no critical close tasks would be missed.