Excel workbook
Monthly Accounts Control Toolkit
A practical checklist set for working out whether a month's accounting is genuinely complete — closing, reconciliation, pending items, debtors and creditors, management review and accounting dependency.
Built to be used directly by a business owner, finance manager or an existing accounting team. No TaxGraph engagement is required to use it.
Entries being posted is not the same thing as a month being closed. Most accounting problems a business eventually discovers — a reconciliation that was never done, a balance nobody questioned, a control that depended entirely on one person — were visible months earlier to anyone who knew what to check.
This toolkit is that list of checks, in a form you can work through.
How to use it
Work through it at the point you would normally consider a month “done”. Each section is a short set of questions with space to record what you found, so the same review can be repeated every month and compared.
It is deliberately not a template set of accounts, and it is not a scoring system. It is a control review: it tells you what has not been checked, which is usually where the problem is.
What it does not do
It does not examine your books, and it will not tell you whether your accounts are correct. It tells you whether the process that produced them included the steps that would catch an error. Those are different questions, and only the second one can be answered from a checklist.
If you would like the gaps it highlights looked at in the context of your actual accounting process, that is a conversation rather than a document — speak to TaxGraph.
This resource is general material for reviewing your own accounting process. It is not advice on a specific situation and does not create a professional relationship. See all resources.