Recommended Month End Procedures
Although there is no formal financial period closing, following are suggestions to assist in ‘closing’ a financial period. Once the first financial period has been balanced, these suggestions can be used every month to make sure that the Aging Report balances each month.
All reports should be run by period and not date.
Balancing Accounts Receivable
General Comments, A/R
Only do these steps after the first of the new month.
Run all reports during the same session. Exporting to Excel creates a fixed record as of the run time.
Run all reports by the financial period that is being balanced, and not date. Important Note: Immediately prior to balancing, lock out the period you are balancing (by changing the first/last open periods with Set Open Periods or on A/R System Setup). Generally, this should only be one period, but Clients may have the current and prior period open if entering month-end adjustments. Be sure to close the prior period once those adjustments have been entered.
Make sure all Invoices for the month are billed and posted to A/R.
Make sure all A/R Payments or Cash Receipts for the month have been entered.
Reports to Run
A/R Aging Detail, Get Data then Download Transactions to Excel. Make sure to include all Companies that have Invoices or Payments this Period.
List of Invoices (A/R Module), select for all Companies, Report Type = “Summary by Invoice with Detail,” Get Invoices then Export to Excel\
List of Payments Received (A/R Module), Get Payments then Export to Excel.
Important Note: The G/L Accounts for the Cash Receipts are significant because it is possible for a Payment to relieve more Receivables than the Cash amount through Discounts and Write-Offs of Invoice Balances during payment allocation, or less Receivables through Write-Offs of COA Balances.
List of G/L Payments (A/R Module), Get Payments then Export to Excel
List of A/R Cash Journal Entries, Get Journals then Export to Excel. You will need the amount of net change to any G/L Account, especially those representing write-off or discount amounts.
If you frequently have cash on account upon entry, which you apply to Invoices later, then this report can be quite large. We recommend adding filters in Excel then for each filter value in Column K (G/L Code), calculate Subtotal of Column N less Subtotal of Column O.
Retrieve the file copy of the A/R Aging Detail you ran from the last period closed, or use the Roll-forward Balance from the last month-end closing.
You can now roll forward the A/R Balance with these reports using the following format:\
Troubleshooting by Running Daily A/R Balancing
The following is in response to client requests, for those having problems reconciling Accounts Receivable. We recommend doing a Daily Balance Roll-Forward. This will help determine if it is a setup or procedural problem. Following are the steps and reports that need to be followed daily:
Starting point – at the end of a day or the beginning of the next day (prior to anyone processing invoices or checks) run an A/R Aging. This aging should be run by period and must be for all companies, all publications, and all clients. It must include all cash and all invoice types. It should not include Collection Agencies. This report should be run in summary and sorted by the bill-to code.
At the end of each day (after all users have finished processing) or the beginning of the next day (prior to anyone processing/posting any invoices or checks) run another aging by period identical to the criteria above.
Run the remaining month-end closing Reports, but filter the results further with an Entry Date of today. You may want to skip the Exporting to Excel unless discrepancies are commonly found.
Complete the A/R Sub-ledger Roll-Forward chart for one day of activity. In other words, the “As Of” lines would for a specific date instead of the whole period.
If the above does not balance, start with the following:
• List of Invoices – Do any of the invoices listed have a T at the end of the invoice number? If so, check to make sure they are not write-offs of an invoice transferred to a Collection Agency. If they are from a Collection Agency, subtract the write-off amount from the total.
If this is still not the difference:
Download the opening aging and the closing aging into Excel. Create a difference column to show the difference between the two reports. This amount for each bill-to should be the net of invoices and cash processed for that date. You may wish to hide the aging columns and only display the client code, client name and balance for each aging. Note: Depending on the size of your data, this can be a tedious process. You will frequently need to re-space one set of the aging due to a client being on one and not the other.
If you utilize the process of paying invoices for one client with another client’s checks, these should net against each other.
Once you have identified differences that do not agree with the invoices, checks and G/L write-offs for that date, you need to review that client and determine what happened with their transactions.
Balancing Accounts Payable
General Comments, A/P
Only do these steps after the first of the new month.
Run all reports during the same session. Exporting to Excel creates a fixed record as of the run time.
Run all reports by the financial period that is being balanced, and not date. Important Note: Immediately prior to balancing, permanently lock out the period you are balancing (by changing the first/last open periods with Set Open Periods or on A/P Company Setup). Generally, this should only be one period, but Clients may have the current and prior period open if entering month-end adjustments. Be sure to close the prior period once those adjustments have been entered.\
Make sure all Invoices for the month are entered and posted to A/P.
Make sure all A/P Checks or Cash Distributions for the month have been entered.
Reports to Run
A/P Aging Detail, Get Data then Download Transactions to Excel. Make sure to include all Company that have AP Invoices or Payments this Period.
List of Invoices (A/P Module), Get Invoices then Export to Excel
List of Payments (AP Module), Get Payments then Export to Excel
List of GL Cash Disbursements, Get Payments then Export to Excel
Retrieve the file copy of the AP Aging Detail you ran from the last Period closed, or use the Roll-forward Balance from the last month-end closing.
You can now roll forward the AP Balance with these reports using the following format: \
Balancing General ledger
General Comments, G/L
Only do these steps after both A/R and A/P month-end are completed.
Run all reports during the same session. Exporting to Excel creates a fixed record as of the run time.
Run all reports by the financial period that is being balanced, and not date.
Important Note: Unlike AR and AP, the GL Open Periods should be left open until all reports are run and the final step is passed. Generally, this means there will be multiple Periods open at once.
Make sure all manual Journal Entries for the month have been entered and posted.
Make sure all transactions for the month have been posted to GL.
Reports to Run
Unposted Transaction Summary. Ensure that count is zero for all transaction types. This is a requirement to close a prior Period in G/L. Some transactions may stay Unposted even after doing a general Post to G/L because of an error on the transaction. Those errors need to be fixed for the transactions to post.
G/L Posting Errors Report. Any items on this list at the end of the Period will require Naviga Support assistance to correct or remove. These items have a status of Failed to Post, which is neither Posted nor Unposted. Users may look back at the Posting Warnings that occurred during the month to see the reported errors for each transaction.
Trial Balance Report with Include Detail = YES. First for all Company, then for each Company individually as needed. On a monthly basis, check the Trial Balance tab for the Debits column total equal the Credits column total. Also, the sum of all GL Account balances (Beginning and Ending columns) should be zero.
A common discrepancy for a single Company is if there was a setup issue and one or more G/L Lines posted to the system Suspense G/L Account 01*9999*9999, which is usually not included in the Trial Balance. A common discrepancy for multiple Company is that a transaction is not balanced on a per-Company basis, either because not required or because the setup was incomplete.
Finding which Transaction is out-of-balance usually requires looking at the details on the Transactions tab in a download of the detail. Run the Trial Balance per Period for the smaller Company, with Include Detail and grouped (on the Transactions tab) by Transaction ID instead of G/L Code, then download to Excel using the grid export instead of the Download buttons.
Then add a column to the right of the Credits column with a formula = cell above + this row Debits – this row Credits, which keeps a running total of the Balance. At the end of each Transaction’s G/L Lines, the balance should return to zero. Where it does not return to zero is a one-sided transaction (for this Company), i.e. missing Multi-Company Control Lines.
Reconciliation of A/R or A/P Balances with General Ledger
The A/R and A/P procedures describe reconciling Aging Reports to lists of transactions (“Register” reports) to confirm the Sub-ledger Balances. A common additional step for month-end is to compare the Sub-ledger Balance to the related G/L Balance(s).
The lists of Invoices noted previously typically include G/L Lines, but the reports can be run differently to put more focus on the G/L Accounts used (“Distribution” or “Journal” reports). The lists of Payments do not have an alternative format.
A/R Module 🡪 List of Invoices: select Report Type = “Break by G/L” instead, then Get Invoices. Now remove the Grouping by G/L Account ID and Export to Excel.
Note that user can also sort by the Invoice ID or G/L Account ID column as needed before exporting to avoid doing that step in Excel.
A/P Module 🡪 List of Invoices: select Break by GL Account = YES then Get Invoices. Now remove the Grouping by G/L Account ID and Export to Excel.
In addition, the Trial Balance can be run differently to restrict the G/L Accounts to only those matching what appears on the A/R or A/P Transaction lists (i.e. Receivables or Payables). If there are multiple G/L Accounts contributing to the balance, you may either create a G/L Code Group containing all the relevant G/L Accounts, or instead use the G/L Transactions Report and other criteria, such as a specific G/L Segment code or Transaction Types. As a last resort, a rough Trial Balance or G/L Transactions Report can be downloaded to Excel and edited to contain only the G/L Lines needed.
Reconciliation between the Subledger Balance and the G/L Balance is a matter of comparing each list of transactions item by item to make sure that they are contained in both reports. If an item is in one report but not the other, then it either needs to be corrected or carried as a reconciling item for that Period (and until the discrepancy resolves).
In many cases, a discrepancy between Subledger and G/L is a matter of one of them not being “closed” properly, such as the posting to G/L not being completed yet, or the G/L Posting Errors Report not being cleared. Also, the reports must start out in a balanced condition for all subsequent reports to have a chance at balancing.
If the Subledger detail is from the A/R Aging, then another common discrepancy is that the Apply Period of a Payment is earlier than the Posting (Financial) Period of the Payment. In other words, the Payment relieves the A/R Balance before it exists in the G/L. The usual correction for this is to Unallocate the Payment and then re-Allocate it in the correct Period.
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