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
01Close operations
The Monthly Close, Run as a Service
We take the month-end close off your team and run it to a published calendar. Twelve business days from cut-off to a locked period and a pack in the owner's hands.
Most closes in a company of this size are not slow because the work is hard. They are slow because nobody owns the sequence. A payroll register arrives late, so accruals wait, so reconciliations wait, so the owner reads a P&L in the third week of the following month and cannot act on it. We fix that by treating the close as an operation with a calendar, an owner per step, and a stated dependency behind every step. The calendar below is the one we actually run. Days are business days counted from the first business day after period end. The close is run by Khaled Hawari, who founded the firm, and the pack is signed by him before it goes out, so the day counts below are what one experienced person can genuinely hold to every period rather than a target nobody meets in December.
ScopeWhat the engagement covers
01What we take over, and what stays with you
We own the close: the calendar, the journals, the reconciliations, the review, the pack and the lock. Your team keeps the three things only your team can do, which are approving what gets paid, confirming what was delivered, and running payroll through your provider. That split matters, because it is also the control boundary. We do not approve payments on accounts we reconcile, and we do not confirm delivery on revenue we recognise. If you have a bookkeeper doing daily entry, they keep doing it and we sit above them. If you do not, we do the transaction processing as well, but the review layer is still performed by a second person on our side.
02Days 1 to 3: cut-off, cash and payables
Day 1 is cut-off. We issue the cut-off notice, pull every bank and corporate card feed through the last calendar day of the period, and sweep the AP inbox. The dependency here is yours: the AP inbox has to be swept by end of Day 1, and nobody submits a period expense after it. Day 2 is cash. Every bank account, card account and merchant settlement account is reconciled to the statement, and anything we cannot identify goes straight onto the open items list with a name against it rather than sitting in a suspense account. Day 3 is payables cut-off. Vendor invoices dated in the period are entered, and anything received but not invoiced is accrued from the purchase order or job record. The received-not-invoiced list goes to your operations lead for confirmation the same morning, because it is the single item that most often drags a close past its date.
03Days 4 to 6: revenue, payroll and recurring schedules
Day 4 is receivables and revenue capture. Everything delivered in the period is invoiced, deferred revenue is released against actual delivery, and unbilled work in progress is recognised or held according to the revenue policy we document with you at the start of the engagement. Where delivery under a contract does not line up with billing, we apply the treatment already agreed in that policy, under the reporting framework you actually use, rather than re-arguing it each month. The dependency is that timesheets or delivery confirmations are closed by end of Day 3. Day 5 is payroll: the final register for the period is tied to the general ledger, employer costs are accrued, and vacation, commission and bonus accruals are updated from the plan schedule rather than from memory. Day 6 is the recurring block, which is prepaids, depreciation, lease schedules, loan amortisation and intercompany. That block sits mid-close deliberately, because it has no external dependency and it can absorb a day of slippage from earlier in the week without moving the final date.
04Days 7 to 9: reconciliation, review and variance
Day 7 is balance sheet reconciliation. Every account carrying a balance gets a supporting schedule that agrees to the ledger, with a named preparer, and an account with no schedule is treated as an exception rather than as a rounding issue. Day 8 is review, and it is a separate person. A reviewer works the reconciliations and every journal above the threshold we set with you, and leaves written review notes that get answered in writing. Verbal review leaves no evidence and does not survive a change of staff, so we do not do it. Day 9 is variance. Actuals go against budget and against the prior period, by line and by service line, and anything past the threshold gets a written explanation traced to a transaction. If the explanation is a guess, we mark it as an open question in the pack rather than dressing it up as analysis.
05Days 10 to 12: pack, commentary and lock
Day 10 is pack assembly: profit and loss by service line, balance sheet, cash flow, the rolling thirteen week cash forecast refreshed against the actual week just closed, and the KPI page. Day 11 is commentary and the management review. We write the commentary before the meeting, not during it, and the meeting is a decision session rather than a walkthrough. Decisions and follow ups are captured with owners and dates on the spot. Day 12 is lock. The period is locked in the ledger so that nobody posts backwards into a reported month, the final pack is issued, the open items list is rolled forward with owners and due dates, and the calendar for the following month is published with the dependency dates already on it.
06Owners and dependencies, written down
Every step above has one name against it, not a department. The close calendar we publish names the preparer, the reviewer where one applies, the hand-off time, and the dependency that has to land before the step can start. Three dependencies sit with your team and only your team: the AP inbox sweep on Day 1, delivery confirmation on Day 3, and the payroll register on Day 5. Everything else is ours. We publish the calendar for the full year in advance so that your operations lead and your payroll administrator can see their dates alongside their own commitments rather than being asked at the last minute.
07What happens when a dependency slips
We hold the date and we disclose. If delivery confirmation does not arrive on Day 3, we accrue on the best available evidence, flag the accrual in the pack as an estimate, and name the outstanding dependency and its owner in the open items list. The close still lands on Day 12. What we do not do is quietly extend the calendar, because a close date that moves whenever something is late is not a close date. Persistent slippage from the same owner shows up on the close scorecard, which reports days to close, the number of post-close adjustments, and late dependencies by owner. That scorecard is how a close gets faster over time, and it is usually the first document that tells an owner where the real bottleneck sits.
OutputWhat you receive
Deliverables
- 01A published close calendar for the full year, with preparer, reviewer, hand-off time and dependency for every step
- 02A reconciliation binder covering every balance sheet account, with preparer and reviewer evidence
- 03The month-end journal file, each entry carrying its support
- 04Profit and loss by service line, balance sheet and cash flow, reviewed and approved
- 05The open items list, carried forward month to month with owners and due dates
- 06A close scorecard: days to close, post-close adjustments, late dependencies by owner
- 07A documented revenue and accrual policy, so the same transaction is treated the same way every month
- 08The year-end file prepared in a format your external accountant can pick up directly, including a CaseWare-ready working paper set
FAQAsked before signing
FAQ: Close operations
We currently close in about six weeks. Can you really hold twelve business days?
Not in the first cycle, and we do not pretend otherwise. The first close is usually longer because we are also validating opening balances and finding out which schedules do not exist. We publish the actual days to close every month from the first cycle onward, including the ones that miss, so you can see the trend rather than take our word for it.
How much of our team's time does this take?
Three hand-offs, and they are short. Someone sweeps the AP inbox on Day 1, someone confirms what was delivered on Day 3, and someone makes the payroll register available on Day 5. The management review on Day 11 is the only meeting, and it is scheduled for the same slot every month.
Do you replace our bookkeeper?
Usually not. Daily transaction processing is cheaper in house, and it keeps knowledge of your customers and vendors inside your company. We run the close over top of that work: the schedules, the accruals, the reconciliations, the review and the pack. If there is no bookkeeper, we do the processing too, and the review is still done by a second person on our side.
Who signs off on the numbers?
Management does. We prepare and review, and the owner or general manager approves the pack. Year-end assurance stays with your external accounting firm. Our job is to hand that firm a file that is already reconciled, so their work is verification rather than reconstruction.
What if our books are too far behind to start a monthly close?
Then the close is not the first engagement. We stabilise the ledger first, validate opening balances, clear the backlog and prove one clean period, and only then put the recurring calendar in place. Running a twelve day close on top of an unreconciled ledger just produces a fast wrong answer.
NextThe other engagements
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
04 Finance systems
Implementing the Finance Stack
How we select and sequence a finance stack: ledger, AP, payroll, expense, reporting, with cutover at a period boundary and a parallel run first.
What this covers
Talk about the monthly close, run as a service.
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.