Period close controls: locking periods and spotting late postings

The problem with a soft close

If a period can still be posted to after the accounts were reported, every historical report becomes a moving target. The board sees one gross margin in March and a different one in June for the same month, and nobody can say which was right.

Locking properly

1. Define the close calendar and the cut-off for each subledger.
2. Post accruals, prepayments, depreciation and FX revaluation.
3. Reconcile bank, receivables, payables and control accounts.
4. Set the period status to closed in the system, not just in a policy document.
5. Route any later change through a reopening approval with a recorded reason.

Two different exceptions

A **post-close posting** is an entry booked into a period that is already closed. That is a control breach and each one deserves investigation.

A **late booking** is an entry recorded long after the transaction date while the period was still open. Common and often benign, especially when a business imports a year of historical bookkeeping at once. These should be summarised, not raised one by one, or the real breaches get buried.

What to review each month

• Count and value of entries posted after the close date.
• Manual journals by preparer, especially near year end.
• Entries with a transaction date far earlier than the posting date.
• Changes to previously reported figures, with the reason recorded.

Audit trail is the deliverable

Auditors do not only want the balance; they want to know who could change it and whether anyone did. A system that records the user, the timestamp and the before-and-after value makes the conversation short.

NanoFora checks both exception types, raising true post-close postings individually and grouping late bookings into one summary. See the month-end close checklist.