Tutorial — Running the Month-End Close

What This Tool Is For

A practical checklist for closing a month so its numbers can be trusted forever after.

Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Step 1 — Sweep the unrecorded: every known cost of the month entered, including estimated items for services consumed but not yet invoiced (the no-invoice Pay Later flow exists exactly for this week).

Step 2 — Reconcile every bank account against its statement to zero difference (see the reconciliation tutorial).

Step 3 — Review the owed list: invoices arrived for last month's estimates? Attach and true-up. Anything overdue? Address it.

Step 4 — Confirm the schedules ran: the month's depreciation and amortization entries posted; subscriptions generated their cycle.

Step 5 — Skim the audit trail for edits reaching into prior closed months; each needs a reason you'd repeat aloud.

Step 6 — Read the month top to bottom on the dashboard — revenue, margin, operating result, cash — and write the three-sentence story of what happened. If you can't, the close isn't done.

Real-World Example

Scenario: First Tuesday of the month, two focused hours: the accountant sweeps in four stragglers, accrues the cloud bill at $8,200 from the usage dashboard, reconciles two accounts (one $180 bank fee surfaced and entered), attaches the invoice that arrived for May's estimate, confirms the schedules, and reads the month: "Revenue up 4%, margin steady, cash down $9k on planned spend." The founders get the summary before lunch — and every number in it can be walked to its source, because the close just verified the paths.

Tips & Common Mistakes

• Close on a fixed calendar day; a close that floats becomes a close that doesn't happen.
• The estimated-costs sweep is the difference between honest months and lumpy ones — never skip it.
• The three-sentence story is the real test: numbers you can't narrate are numbers you don't yet understand.

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Everything described in this tutorial is a working feature of TupicFinance, the financial management platform of the Tupic ecosystem. The screens, workflows, and guardrails above behave exactly as written there — this guide doubles as the platform's user manual for this tool.