Month End And Year End Close Playbook

Month-End and Year-End Close Playbook

Overview

Close is a controlled workflow, not a calendar reminder. Each close task has owner, due date, dependency, evidence, review state, exception state, and release decision. Close ends with a documented release state: pass, pass-with-caveats, or fail. Year-end close adds retained-earnings close, lock-period procedure, reopen governance, audit-request tracking, and a final report freeze.

Required first reads

• doctrine/accounting-finance-doctrine.md
• doctrine/references/ledger-invariants.md (period state)
• doctrine/references/required-patterns.md
• doctrine/examples/reconciliation-evidence-pack.md
• bank-and-mobile-money-reconciliation SKILL
• audit-ready-reporting-pack SKILL
• This skill's references/close-task-template.md.

Close task list (standard)

Grouped by area. The exact list is configurable per entity; the categories are not.

Pre-close

Subledger close

Reconciliations

Adjustments

Reports

Release

Year-end specifics

• Retained-earnings close: close all 4xxx–9xxx accounts into 3300 Current-Year Profit/Loss; sweep 3300 to 3200 Retained Earnings at year-end.
• Lock-period procedure: after sign-off and audit window, lock all months of the financial year.
• Reopen governance: reopen requires Controller + CFO approval, time-boxed, audit-logged.
• Audit-request tracking: every auditor request logged with respondent, evidence, status, due date.
• Final report freeze: financial statements signed by directors; subsequent corrections become prior-period adjustments under Section 10 / IAS 8.

Period-state transitions

Release states

• pass — no blockers; all checks complete; all reconciliations matched; reviewer sign-off recorded.
• pass-with-caveats — no blockers; named items carry forward (e.g. tax provision pending tax-reviewer sign-off) with assigned owner and target date.
• fail — blocker(s) remain; close not released.

Control-preserving Kaizen for close

After each close, review elapsed time, late tasks, repeat exceptions, manual journals, unreconciled items, rework, evidence defects, and reviewer queries. Classify each finding as waste, data-quality failure, control deficiency, training gap, or accounting judgement. Select one small reversible improvement with a baseline, hypothesis, owner, timebox, guardrail, expected evidence, and rollback.

The guardrail must preserve double-entry, cut-off, period state, immutable audit trail, reviewer independence, segregation of duties, source-document traceability, tax/statutory verification, and report tie-outs. Re-perform the close, test a failure path, obtain independent review, and compare the result with the baseline before standardising the change in the close task template, runbook, training, and test fixture. Report the audit at min(raw score, 65) and make the remediation plan target 95/100; the cap never waives a close blocker.

Facility-change logic applies to ERP or close-process transitions: readiness evidence, continuity/fallback, cutover/rollback, stabilisation, reconciliation, and lessons-learned sign-off are required before the new close becomes standard.

Acceptance evidence

Forbidden patterns

• Closing a period without subledger tie-out.
• Posting to a locked period via a back door.
• Sign-off without reviewer identity in the audit log.
• Close report missing a print stylesheet.
• Reopen without Controller + CFO approval.

Files

• SKILL.md.
• references/close-task-template.md — full task template with owners and dependencies.
• references/year-end-extras.md — retained-earnings close, lock window, audit requests.
• examples/first-close-checklist.md — first close after go-live.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-12. Next review due: 2026-11-12.

Prerequisites

• Load doctrine/accounting-finance-doctrine.md before applying this skill.
• Load governance/finance-accounting-quality-gate.md when the output is a release, client artefact, SRS, SDS, proposal, business plan, or implementation plan.
• Use doctrine/source-register/ for final statutory, tax, payroll, FX, EFRIS, eTIMS, or authority-template values.

Inputs

Outputs

Decision Rules

• Prefer IFRS for SMEs for typical SME entities unless full IFRS, local law, donor requirements, or client policy requires otherwise.
• Treat every money-touching workflow as ledger, control, reconciliation, evidence, and reporting scope.
• Do not finalize statutory values without source-register support and reviewer status.
• Use business-language output for operators and accountant-language output for ledger, reporting, and audit users.
• Escalate uncertain framework, tax, or statutory interpretations to the required reviewer role instead of presenting them as final.

Acceptance Evidence

• Inputs and outputs above are present or explicitly marked not applicable.
• Relevant quality-gate blockers have been checked and no blocker remains unresolved.
• Examples or fixtures cover at least one happy path and one failure or caveat path for this skill's domain.
• Reviewer role, review date, and open caveats are recorded for release-grade artefacts.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating draft planning assumptions as final statutory or accounting facts.
• Hiding tax, payroll, FX, or authority-template caveats in prose instead of source-register state.
• Producing technically correct accounting output without a plain-language layer for non-accountant users.
• Closing a remediation or implementation item without observable evidence.

Required References

• doctrine/accounting-finance-doctrine.md.
• governance/finance-accounting-quality-gate.md.
• docs/reference-manifest.md for declared reference states.
• Domain-specific references listed earlier in this skill.

Examples

• Include at least one normal workflow example for this skill's domain.
• Include at least one exception, rejection, reversal, stale-source, or reviewer-caveat example where the domain can fail.

Review Metadata

Last reviewed: 2026-05-15. Next review due: 2026-11-15.