- Cut off the month: post everything, clear the order-to-invoice gap, and lock the prior period.
- Do the subledger work in order: bank rec, recurring journals, depreciation, inventory cost, and currency.
- Reconcile AR, AP, and inventory to their control accounts, using Preview Posting on any correction.
- Close the period and run the reporting pack, then time-box and document the whole checklist.
Month-end shouldn't be a fresh adventure every time. This is the close, in order, as a checklist you can run in Business Central (Microsoft's cloud ERP, or enterprise resource planning, system) and hand to the next person without a knowledge transfer. Work it top to bottom and you finish with books that tie and a reporting pack ready to send.
This assumes you have posting permissions and a defined close calendar.
Phase 1: Stop the bleeding (cutoffs)
- Post everything for the month. Clear unposted sales and purchase invoices and credit memos. Pull up the list of unposted documents and work it to zero, or deliberately defer items to next month.
- Close the order-to-invoice gap. Run your "shipped but not invoiced" view so no delivered work is sitting unbilled.
- Lock the prior period. In General Ledger Setup (or per user in User Setup), set Allow Posting From to the first day of the month you're closing, so nobody posts into a period you've already finished.
Phase 2: The subledger work
- Bank reconciliation. Import your statement or use the bank feed, open Bank Account Reconciliation, match transactions, and post. Your bank balance should agree to the general ledger.
- Recurring journals. Post accruals, prepaid amortization, and allocations through a Recurring General Journal, using the recurring methods and allocation percentages you set up once and reuse monthly.
- Fixed assets. Run Calculate Depreciation, review the resulting journal, and post it.
- Inventory. Run Adjust Cost - Item Entries, then Post Inventory Cost to G/L. This is the step people skip, and it's why inventory stops tying to the general ledger.
- Currency. If you transact in more than one currency, run Adjust Exchange Rates for the period.
Phase 3: Reconcile and review
- Tie subledgers to the general ledger. Confirm accounts receivable agrees to the receivables control account, payables to the payables control, and inventory to its control account. Account schedules or the built-in reconciliation reports make this fast.
- Review and correct. Scan the trial balance for anything odd. For any correcting entry, use Preview Posting first so you can see the exact ledger impact before you commit. Preview Posting saves nothing, so it's risk-free.
Clean dimensions (department, location, project) are what make your reporting a two-minute report instead of a spreadsheet. If your reporting is painful, the fix is usually upstream in how dimensions are set, not in the report itself.
Phase 4: Close and report
- Close the period. Move Allow Posting From to the new month. (Year-end has an extra step, Close Income Statement, which is a separate routine.)
- Run the reporting pack. Produce your balance sheet, profit and loss, and budget-versus-actual from your account schedules and financial reports, export to Excel if your readers want it, and distribute.
- Time-box and document. Note who owns each step and your target, for example "close by business day five." The checklist is the asset, so protect it.
If inventory won't reconcile, ninety percent of the time it's because Adjust Cost - Item Entries wasn't run before posting cost to the general ledger.
Where to take it next
Once the close is repeatable, the next wins are automating the recurring journals and building a one-click reporting pack. If you'd like the downloadable checklist template, let's talk it through.