Month-End Close with Owners, Approvals and Evidence

The close checklist lives on the Month-end Close screen. Open Accounting, then Accounting Periods, and click Close checklist, or pick Month-end Close from the Accounting quick actions. The page is titled Month-end Close followed by the month, with buttons to step back and forward a month. It has two lists. Checked for you is what AWRA reads from the ledger itself: no manual journals left unposted, bank accounts reconciled, depreciation posted, petty cash vouchers approved, the trial balance balances, every account with a balance is classified, and the month before is closed. Each check shows ready, needs attention or not applicable, with an Open link to the screen that fixes it.

Your steps are the tasks only people can do, such as recording accruals or counting till floats. Open Edit the checklist steps at the foot of the page, type a New step and a Description, and click Add step. Each step has three planning fields. Owner is the person responsible (or Nobody in particular). Due (days after month end) is how many days after the last day of the month it should be done; 5 means the fifth. Waits on names another step that must be ticked or skipped first. Until then the Done button is greyed out with a tooltip naming the step it waits on, and AWRA refuses to tick it. A step can be marked Done, or Skipped with a short reason, and Undo takes a tick back unless a later step that waits on it is already done.

In practice: a Nairobi distributor sets up five steps for October. Stores counts the till floats (owner: the stores supervisor, due day 1), the accountant posts accruals (due day 3, waits on the float count), and the finance manager reviews the trial balance (due day 5, waits on accruals). On 4 November the accruals step is still open, so it shows Overdue and the accountant gets a reminder by email and in the bell. Overdue owners hear about their own steps once a week until the step is ticked or the month is closed. A step with no owner or no due day is left to the general month-end reminder instead.

At the foot of the Month-end Close screen, someone with permission to manage accounts sees a card called Close followed by the month. If any check or step is not ready, the card says how many items are not ready and that you can still close, saying why in the notes. By default the checklist is information for the person deciding, not a gate: closing stays an owner’s decision. A workspace can change that under Settings, Accounting Defaults, Month-end close: with the block on, open steps and failing high-severity checks refuse the close, and only someone holding Override close block can close anyway, with a written reason that is kept in the audit log and the evidence pack. Type the reason into Notes, for example that the bank statement has not arrived yet, and click Close month. The same can be done from the Accounting Periods screen with Month to close, Notes and Close period.

A closed month is locked. Entries dated in it cannot be posted, changed or removed, and automatic postings made while the current month is closed move to the first open day. Every close also stores an evidence pack: the trial balance and statements for the month, the balance sheet to date, the ledger integrity checks, the checklist with who ticked or skipped each step and why, any approved reopens, and the last posting number the close saw. It is saved with a SHA-256 checksum and never changed. Closing again after a reopen adds Version 2, which also lists what changed since Version 1.

In practice: the finance manager of a Kampala NGO closes September on 6 October with one step skipped (no payroll accrual, because staff are paid on the 30th) and notes the reason. Under Evidence packs the card now lists Version 1 with its date and the start of its checksum. When the donor’s auditor asks in March what the books looked like at the close, she downloads Version 1 from the Accounting Periods table, under the Evidence column. The file is the same one saved that day, and a warning icon would show beside it if its checksum ever stopped matching.

A closed month opens again only through a request. On the Month-end Close screen of a closed month the card reads Reopen followed by the month; fill in Why it needs reopening and click Ask to reopen. On Accounting Periods the closed row has its own Ask to reopen button. The month stays closed while the request waits, and it appears under Waiting to be reopened with who asked and the reason. Everyone who may approve, except the person who asked, is reminded daily until it is decided.

Approving needs the approve period reopen permission, and the person who asked cannot approve their own request. They see Withdraw request instead, while an approver sees Approve reopen and Decline, with an optional Note. There is one exception: when nobody else in the workspace holds that permission, the request is approved on the spot and the record says that the requester approved it because nobody else could. Once the month is open again, every posting dated inside it is written to the audit log against that reopen, with its reason, and the Month-end Close card lists it under Posted after the first close.

In practice: a Mombasa freight company closed August, then a clearing agent’s August invoice for KES 184,000 arrives on 12 September. The accountant asks to reopen August with the reason “Late clearing agent invoice for container MSKU-4471”. The finance director approves it with the note “Agreed, book to August”. The bill is posted, shows under Posted after the first close, and is in the audit log as a posting into a reopened period. The accountant closes August again, and evidence Version 2 records the reopen, who approved it and the bill it let in.

Rent, insurance and other fixed monthly entries can be made once and repeated. Open a posted manual journal (Accounting, Manual Journals, then the journal) and expand Make recurring. Give it a Name, choose Every (Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly), set On day (1 to 31) and, if it should stop, an Until (optional) date, then click Make recurring. The first run is the next period after the journal’s own date. All recurring journals are listed on the Recurring journals screen at /accounting/journal-entries/recurring, with Every, Next run, Last made and Status, and Pause, Resume and Remove buttons. Removing one leaves the journals it already made on the ledger.

Each run is made early every morning, dated on its day. It is saved and submitted as the person who set it up, so it posts straight away or waits for approval exactly as the same journal typed by hand would, including the second signature on a sensitive account. A run that cannot be saved, for instance because an account was switched off or the month is closed with nothing open after it, stops the recurring journal and records why in the audit log, rather than silently skipping a period. If its author is no longer an active user, it stops too and must be re-created from a journal under an active user. It repeats the same lines; it does not reverse itself the next month.

In practice: a Kigali school posts its January rent journal for RWF 2,400,000 on 1 January, then makes it recurring, Monthly, on day 1, until 31 December. Every month the journal appears dated the 1st without anyone typing it. The lease and the landlord’s invoice belong with it: on the posting page (reached from the ledger or a statement line), the Attachments card has Attach a file and Attach. PDF, image, Word, Excel, CSV and text files up to 10 MB can be attached by anyone who can create journals, and are opened through a link that checks the viewer may see journals.