01 Close operations
The Monthly Close, Run as a Service
We run month-end on a fixed twelve business day calendar, with a named owner and a stated dependency behind every step, ending in a reviewed pack.
What this covers
06Close remediation
Taking Over a Close That Is Failing
Some closes cannot be sped up because they are not slow, they are wrong. This is the stabilisation engagement we run before any recurring close calendar goes in.
There is a difference between a close that takes too long and a close that has stopped being reliable. The second one usually announces itself the same way: a year-end that produced a long list of adjusting entries, a balance sheet with accounts nobody can explain, a suspense account that has been growing quietly, or a bookkeeper who left and took the only working knowledge of the file with them. Putting a twelve day close calendar on top of that produces a fast wrong answer. So we run remediation first as its own engagement with its own end point, which is one period that closes cleanly and can be proven to have closed cleanly. Remediation is done by Khaled Hawari rather than delegated. The judgements in it, what to write off, what to restate and what to leave alone, are the reason the engagement exists, and he carried IFRS 15 and IFRS 16 into acquired entities at Harris Computer Systems before founding the firm.
ScopeWhat the engagement covers
01The symptoms that bring us in
The calls tend to come in one of five shapes. The external accountant returned a long list of adjusting entries at year end, and the monthly numbers the owner had been reading all year turned out to be materially different from the final ones. The person who ran the books left, and nobody can reproduce what they did because none of it was written down. A lender asked for a covenant calculation and nobody could support the inputs. The bank reconciliation has an unexplained difference that has been carried and grown for several months. Or revenue and cash have drifted apart in a way nobody can account for, usually because deferred revenue, unbilled work or customer deposits were never tracked properly. Each of these has a different root cause, which is why the first thing we do is not fix anything.
02Week one: triage, with nothing repaired
The first week is diagnosis and evidence gathering only. We take a copy of the ledger and work outward from the balance sheet, because that is where errors accumulate and where a wrong figure survives indefinitely. Every account gets one of three verdicts: supported, meaning there is a schedule that agrees to the balance; unsupported but explicable, meaning we can rebuild the support; and unknown, meaning the balance cannot currently be tied to anything. We do the same across the subledgers, checking whether receivable and payable ageings agree to their control accounts in detail rather than in total. We map who has been doing what, what access exists, and which system holds the authoritative version of each record. The output is a ranked defect list with an estimate of effort against each item and a plain statement of which balances are currently unreliable. Repairing an account before this is complete destroys the evidence of what went wrong.
03The suspense sweep and the reconciliation backlog
Suspense accounts are where unresolved transactions go to be forgotten, and clearing them is usually the single largest piece of the work. We clear by identifying rather than by writing off: every item is traced back to a source document, a bank entry or a subledger record, and only what genuinely cannot be identified after that is written off, with the amount disclosed rather than buried in an expense line. Unreconciled bank periods are worked forward from the last month that can be proven correct rather than backward from today, because working backwards through a broken sequence means every difference has to be tested against every prior period. Along the way we rebuild the schedules that should have existed and did not: prepaids, accruals, deferred revenue, leases, loans, intercompany. Those schedules are the actual deliverable, because their absence is why the file broke in the first place.
04The restatement decision
At some point in every remediation there is a question of whether to correct prior reported periods or to fix forward from a defined date. We treat it as a decision with written reasoning rather than a default. Restating is warranted when a reported figure was materially wrong and somebody relied on it, which typically means a lender covenant calculation, a shareholder distribution, a bonus or commission payment based on reported results, a filed return, or a transaction priced off those numbers. Fixing forward from a clean opening balance is the right answer when the error affects internal reporting only and the cost of reconstructing the history exceeds what anyone would learn from it. Where prior periods are restated we produce a bridge showing the change by line and by cause, because an owner who has been reading a number all year is entitled to see exactly how it moved and why. Where a corrected figure affects a return already filed or a lender covenant already reported, that goes to your external accountant and to the lender through the proper channel, and we say so in the memo rather than leaving it to be discovered.
05Catching up without stopping the current month
The trap in every catch-up engagement is that the backlog absorbs everything and the current period falls behind, so the gap never actually closes. We run two tracks from day one. The current month is closed on a simplified calendar with reduced scope, producing cash, revenue, payroll and the major accruals, which is enough for the owner to operate on while it is explicitly labelled as provisional. The backlog track runs in parallel and works forward from the last proven period. The two tracks meet at a defined date, agreed at the start and tracked openly, and from that point the full close calendar applies. Splitting the work this way costs more effort than doing one and then the other, and it is the only version that reliably finishes.
06Proving it holds before we hand it back
Remediation ends with evidence, not with an assurance that things are better now. The end point is one full period closed on the standard calendar, with every balance sheet account supported by a schedule, a second person's review notes on file, the ageings agreeing to their control accounts in detail, and the period locked in the ledger. Alongside it we hand over the written procedure for each recurring step, because the most common cause of a file breaking a second time is that it was fixed by someone who did not write down how. We also hand over a baseline close scorecard, so the following months are measured against a starting point rather than against an impression.
07When it turns out not to be a close problem
Sometimes the diagnosis comes back saying the close is a symptom. The ledger cannot carry the dimensions the reporting needs, or the system cannot lock a period so people post backwards into reported months, in which case the answer is a systems engagement rather than a remediation. Or the process is fine and the problem is that one person is doing four incompatible jobs with no review, in which case the answer is a control redesign. Or, occasionally, the answer is that the discrepancies are not errors, and that is a different conversation entirely, one we have directly with the owner and with nobody else in the company. We would rather tell you the engagement you asked for is the wrong one than run it and bill for it.
OutputWhat you receive
Deliverables
- 01A triage memo with a ranked defect list and a verdict of supported, rebuildable or unknown for every balance
- 02A validated opening balance position from the last period that can be proven correct
- 03A suspense clearance schedule showing each item identified, with any write-off disclosed separately
- 04Rebuilt supporting schedules for prepaids, accruals, deferred revenue, leases, loans and intercompany
- 05Subledger to control account agreement, in detail, for receivables and payables
- 06A written restatement decision memo, including the bridge by line and by cause where periods are restated
- 07A dual-track catch-up plan with a dated point at which the backlog and the current month meet
- 08One full period closed on the standard calendar, reviewed, supported and locked
- 09A written procedure for every recurring step, and a baseline close scorecard
FAQAsked before signing
FAQ: Close remediation
How long does remediation usually take?
It is driven by how many periods are unreconciled and by how much source documentation still exists, not by the size of the company. The triage week exists precisely so that we can give you a real estimate against a real defect list rather than a number before we have opened the file.
Do you need to tell our external accountant?
Where a corrected figure affects a filed return or a covenant already reported, yes, and that is not optional. We prepare the analysis and it goes to them through you. For everything else, they benefit from the work rather than being burdened by it, because they receive a reconciled file instead of a reconstruction project.
What if the previous bookkeeper is still here?
Most files we take over are broken by workload, no review and no written procedure rather than by anyone's bad intent, and a person who has been carrying an unreconciled file alone is often relieved. We work with them, because they hold context nobody else has. If the triage finds something that changes that assessment, it goes to the owner privately and we stop and take instruction before doing anything further.
Can you just do a one-off cleanup without an ongoing engagement?
Yes. Remediation is scoped and priced as its own piece of work with its own end point, and it ends with a written procedure set so your team can carry it. We would rather hand back a file that holds than create a dependency on us.
How do we know it will not break again?
Because the end point is not a tidy balance sheet, it is a repeatable process: schedules that exist, a review step performed by a second person, a locked period, and a written procedure for each recurring task. The close scorecard then makes any drift visible within a month or two rather than at the following year end.
NextThe other engagements
02 Management reporting
The Reporting Pack We Deliver Every Month
A page by page walk through the management pack we issue each month: P&L by service line, thirteen week cash, variance commentary and a KPI page.
What this covers
03 Financial controls
Segregation of Duties in a 15 Person Company
The control matrix we install in small Canadian companies: who authorises, executes, records and reconciles, and what to do when you cannot split a duty.
What this covers
Talk about taking over a close that is failing.
Bring the last three periods and whoever currently touches the ledger. An hour is enough to tell you whether this engagement is the right one and what it would take to run it.