# Month-end close checklist for a small business, with crypto in the mix

URL: https://www.orla.finance/en/blog/month-end-close-checklist-small-business
Markdown twin of that page. Append `.md` to any Orla page URL to get one.

Rubric: Back office. Published 2026-09-26. Written by Orla.

Month-end close sounds like something a finance team does. In a company of six it is one person, a Saturday and a folder called sort out; this is the order that turns the Saturday into a morning.

Your accountant closes the books: adjusting entries, accruals, the general ledger. That is not this checklist. This one is everything that has to be true before the accountant can start, and it comes down to four things: every movement of money is in the book, every row says what it was, every row that needs paper has it, and the month is sealed so it stops moving while somebody works on it. Get those four right and the accountant's close is a file import. Get them wrong and the accountant's first email is a list of questions you answer from memory.

The order below matters. Each step makes the next one shorter, and the steps that block the close come before the ones that only go into the record.

### 1. Every account's month is in

Bank and card statements imported or, where a live connection exists, synced. Sales platforms' reports in. Exchange history synced. Wallets read: a watched wallet refreshes hourly, and a wallet added late needs its Sync button pressed once so the history before the first watch is read.

The test is simple. For every account that moved this month, can you point at its statement and say the closing balance? If not, nothing downstream is worth doing yet.

In Orla the month's checklist asks exactly that: every bank, card and platform account that moved has a statement filed for the month, and each statement's closing balance is compared with the book on the month's last day. For a synced account without a statement, the provider's movement is compared with what the book explains.

### 2. Every row has a category

Uncategorised rows are the one thing that blocks a close everywhere, because a row without a category books to nowhere. Do this after step 1 and not before, or you categorise twice.

Most rows should never reach you. Rules file the recurring payees on import, a built-in merchant dictionary files the well-known ones, and a payee you filed once suggests itself the next time. What is left is a short list, and it can be filed by description rather than one by one: "everything from Wolt last month" into a category, with the card showing how many rows and by which filter before you press, and a limit of 200 rows per press so a wrong guess is never large.

At the end of the month the archive's README says how the month was sorted: how many rows a rule you wrote filed, how many the merchant dictionary, how many a person by hand. That is the first question an accountant asks about a book somebody else kept.

### 3. Every expense has its paper

A receipt is in the pocket of whoever paid, which is rarely the person doing this list. "Expenses with no paper" lists the biggest expenses of the last three months without a receipt. Receipts forwarded by mail, or dropped on a transaction, close their rows. For the rest, ask: tick the rows, pick the teammate where Orla can tell who paid, and one message per teammate carries all their rows. Two reminders follow, on the third and the seventh morning. "No paper for this one" is the honest answer for a market stall or a tip, and it removes the row for good.

A missing receipt does not block the close. It goes into the record: the month can be sealed "with 3 receipts missing", and that note is what the accountant reads.

### 4. Bills: what you owe suppliers

Every accepted bill should be in one of three states: paid, part paid with the remainder known, or open with a due date. A bill drafted from an emailed invoice is accepted by a person, and payment details never come from the email, only from the supplier's contact card. Entering the same supplier and invoice number twice is refused, because one supplier invoice is one debt.

A bill due this month and still open goes into the record, not into the block list. It is also the number the accountant will ask about first. How a bill should get from the inbox to a payment, with a threshold and a second signature, is [its own post](/en/blog/supplier-bill-approvals-small-team).

### 5. Invoices: what clients owe you

The same three states on the other side: paid, part paid, open. Past due gets one line per client, with how late the oldest one is, how many reminders went out, whether the client answered, and one next step in plain words. A client who promised a date has it written on the invoice, so nobody chases them before it passes.

A month with unpaid client invoices can still close. What should not survive the month is an income row that points at no invoice and that nobody can explain; "Paid without an invoice" lists those by payer, and "Not a sale" sets a payer aside for good.

### 6. Nothing is waiting for a signature

A payment proposed this month and still waiting for a signature is money the month has not decided about. It blocks the close, on purpose: a sealed month with a payment pending inside it would change the moment somebody signed. Sign it, reject it or withdraw it first.

### 7. Crypto: three things that are not what they look like

This is where a spreadsheet close breaks, and it breaks quietly.

**A transfer between your own wallets is not a sale and not income.** Two wallets watched on the same network recognise the move and book it once, as a transfer. Watched on different networks, or with one wallet not in the book, the same move reads as spending on one side and income on the other, and the month is wrong by twice the amount. The tax side of the same question is [answered here](/en/crypto-budgeting-app/is-transferring-crypto-taxable).

**The network fee is a row.** Whatever the chain charged appears as a separate small expense named "Network fee", in the coin the chain charged: SOL for a USDC transfer on Solana, TRX on TRON. That is the only way the fee reaches cashflow, and it is a disposal of that coin in the tax report, so the holdings the report thinks you have match the ones you have.

**Every disposal needs a cost.** A coin sold, swapped or spent came from lots bought or received at some price. "Cost basis to fill in" lists the two cases: transactions nothing could value, fixed by typing what they cost, and coins sold that the ledger never saw arrive, fixed by adding the holding you already had, dated before the sale.

Then one check a spreadsheet cannot do: **book against chain**. For every wallet and asset, what the ledger says is held stands next to what the address actually holds. An airdrop or an unimported transfer shows with a book quantity of zero, which is usually the most useful row on the page. How a stablecoin payout reaches the accountant as journal lines is [worked through in the contractor guide](/en/pay-contractors/usdc).

### 8. Every currency has a rate on every day

A currency with no exchange rate on some day of the month is a warning, not a block. Those rows still export, with the amount that moved and an empty base-currency column, because nobody in the workspace can supply a rate that does not exist. The screen names the currencies. Check the list so the empty column does not surprise the accountant.

### 9. Every category and account has a code

The chart of accounts is entered once and reused every period: every category and every account gets the code it books to in the accounting system. Orla never guesses a code, because the same number means different things at different companies. Two things people forget. Archived accounts and old categories stay on the list, because past periods still need them. And "Realised gain or loss on crypto" is on the list with everything else: a disposal in the period with no code for it stops the export, because dropping that line would hand over an entry that does not balance.

### 10. Close it

Now the checklist reads "Ready to close". What blocks: a row without a category, a code missing, a payment waiting for a signature. What goes into the record: a receipt missing, a bill or a client invoice still open, a currency without a rate, a statement not filed or not matching, an earlier month still open.

Close seals the month once nothing blocks, and asks for an optional note; without one the record gets a summary such as "closed with 3 receipts missing". A closed month's rows are read-only: adding, editing or deleting anything dated in it is refused with the month named and the way to reopen. Only an owner or admin can reopen, with a reason, and both are recorded. Closing a month and the journal export are on Pro and above; the checklist and the chart of accounts are on every plan.

### 11. Hand it over

The month leaves as one archive: the journal when every row has a code (otherwise a text file naming the gaps, never a half-journal), a statement for every account in both the QuickBooks Online and the Xero presets, the payments with who proposed and who signed, the invoices issued that month as PDFs, the crypto disposals by lot with cost basis, proceeds, gain, holding period and hash, and a README saying what is inside and why anything is missing.

Downloading the archive is what marks the month as handed over, and the archive stamps a fingerprint of it. A row added, edited or deleted afterwards turns the month into "changed after the handoff", so the accountant is sent the month again instead of working from a stale file. There is no Xero or QuickBooks login to connect: the handoff is a file. An accountant who closes months for several clients this way can [join the partner program](/en/partners), with a seat in each client's space that reads and exports but never pays.

### The list, to print

1. Every account that moved has its statement in, closing balance known.
2. Every row has a category.
3. Every expense has its receipt, or an honest "no paper".
4. Every bill is paid, part paid with the remainder known, or open with a date.
5. Every client invoice is paid, part paid, or open with a next step.
6. No payment is waiting for a signature.
7. Transfers between your own wallets are transfers; network fees are rows; every disposal has a cost; book equals chain.
8. Every currency has a rate on every day, or you know which do not.
9. Every category and account has a code, the realised crypto gain included.
10. Close, with a note.
11. Download the archive: that is the handover.

### How long this takes

Nobody can promise a number, and this post will not. What the order does is move the work off the last day: statements arrive through the month, rules file rows as they land, receipts are asked for the week the expense happened, and the checklist is drawn fresh every time it is opened, so on the first of the month it is a short list of what is left rather than the whole month. [The month in Orla](/en/product/month) shows the screens this post describes.