Month end close checklist

A month end close checklist is usually a spreadsheet somebody inherited: a list of tasks with initials beside them, edited under pressure, never quite reviewed. It tells you what to do and nothing about how long it will take, which is why closes overrun and nobody can say by how much. This worksheet prices the close instead. Put in the number of tasks, the average minutes one takes, how many need a review as well, how many people are on it and how many hours a day they actually give it, and it returns the hours in the close, the hours each person carries and the working days it will run to. It also shows what one more person would do to that number, which is the argument most finance teams have every quarter without ever putting figures on it.

Count the tasks honestly, including the chasing

Forty tasks at forty-five minutes is 30 hours. The number most teams underestimate is the count, not the duration: the checklist holds the accounting tasks and omits the chasing, the queries and the re-work, which is exactly the part that makes a close slip. Put the real number in and the answer stops being optimistic.

Reviews are work too

Six tasks needing a thirty-minute review adds 3 hours, taking the close to 33. Review time is almost never on the checklist because it belongs to a different person, and it is often the constraint: the preparer is finished and the month is not closed.

Working days, and what one more person would do

33 hours across two people giving it six hours a day is 2.75 working days. Across three it is 1.83. That difference is the hiring argument in arithmetic, and the sheet deliberately does not tell you whether the tasks actually divide that way, because they often do not.