The Ninety Days Before Year End, Week by Week
Almost everything that makes year end painful can be done in the quarter before it, and almost none of it ever is.
How difficult your year end is going to be has already been decided by the time the year ends. It was decided over the preceding quarter, by whether anybody spent that quarter cleaning up, and if nobody did then the difficulty is now fixed and the only remaining variable is who absorbs it.
That is the whole argument. The corollary is the part people resist: almost none of the work in this calendar is accounting. It is account hygiene. Chasing a deposit that has sat in a supplier’s hands for two years, finding the invoice for a piece of equipment, getting somebody to say out loud whether a receivable is ever arriving. There is no judgement in most of it and no skill beyond persistence, which is exactly why it does not get done. Nothing in it produces a document anybody wants to look at.
So the thirteen weeks below are dull on purpose, and the test of whether a company is going to have a quiet year end is not how good its finance people are. It is whether anybody owns these weeks.
Two conventions, because a calendar that assumes December is not a calendar
Every row here is anchored to your own fiscal year end, in weeks. “YE minus 11” means the eleventh week before your year end. Nothing is anchored to a month name and no date appears anywhere, because a great many incorporated Canadian companies do not close their year in December and a calendar written in month names quietly excludes all of them. If your year end is not December, the finance calendar for a non-December year end sets out the other half of the picture, which is the annual obligations that do not move with your fiscal year at all.
That piece gives the pre-year-end quarter three rows, one per relative month. This is those three rows opened up. Treat the week numbers as approximate. The sequence is what matters, and the sequence is not arbitrary: block two cannot start until block one has produced the request list, and block four cannot start until block three has stopped finding surprises.
The calendar you are already running in these weeks
Before the blocks, the collision, because pretending it does not exist is how this calendar gets abandoned in week four.
The budget build occupies the same thirteen weeks. It also starts around YE minus 13 and it also ends at the year end. If your company runs both, and both land on the same person, the year end preparation loses. Every time. Not because it is less important but because the budget has somebody asking for it every week and the balance sheet sweep has nobody asking for it at all. An unreconciled deposit account does not send emails.
There are two workable answers and one that is not workable. The workable ones: give the sweep a named owner who is not the person consolidating the budget, or move the budget build a full block earlier so its heavy weeks sit against this calendar’s light ones. The one that does not work is deciding that a competent person will fit both in, which is what most companies decide, and which is why the sweep is still being done in the weeks after the cut.
Block one, YE minus 13 to YE minus 10: agree the shape of the thing
The output of this block is not clean accounts. It is an agreement, in writing, with the person who will report on your statements.
| Week | What happens | Who | What closes the week |
|---|---|---|---|
| YE minus 13 | Book the year end planning conversation with your accountant, and book it now rather than when you are ready for it. Confirm the engagement type for this year and whether it has changed, the reporting framework, the timetable, and how fees are set. | Owner or finance lead | A booked meeting with an agenda attached |
| YE minus 12 | Hold it. Walk them through what changed in the business this year: a new financing, a new line of business, a customer or supplier relationship that became large, an acquisition, a lease signed, a shareholder transaction, a change in how something is invoiced. Ask directly which of those changes affects presentation or disclosure. | Owner and finance lead | A note of the changes and their answer to each |
| YE minus 11 | Get the request list. Last year’s, if this year’s is not ready yet, because the two are largely the same document. Assign every line on it to a named person with a due week. | Finance lead | The request list, assigned, in one place |
| YE minus 10 | Go through the assigned list and mark the lines where the thing being asked for does not currently exist. Those lines, and only those lines, are the real work of the next nine weeks. | Finance lead | A shortlist of schedules that have to be built rather than fetched |
Week YE minus 10 is the week that earns the block. Most companies treat the request list as a fetching exercise and discover in the weeks after the cut that six of its lines were construction jobs. Sorting fetch from build while there is still a quarter left is the difference between a schedule assembled properly and one assembled overnight from whatever could be found.
The other thing this block buys is a hearing. Your accountant’s own heavy season is not yours, and a company that opens the conversation a quarter out gets a considered answer to the presentation question. A company that opens it after the cut gets a fast one.
Block two, YE minus 9 to YE minus 6: the sweep
This is the longest block and it should be. It is also the one that gets compressed when the first two blocks slip, and compressing it defeats the entire calendar, because everything in blocks three and four assumes the ledger underneath is no longer moving.
| Week | What happens | Who | What closes the week |
|---|---|---|---|
| YE minus 9 | Sweep the accounts that are pure evidence: bank and card accounts, loans against the lender’s own schedules, and every clearing and suspense account. These either agree to an outside document or they do not, so they are quick, and they set the tone. | Bookkeeper | Every cash and debt account tied to an external statement |
| YE minus 8 | Sweep receivables and payables. Not the totals, the old items. Anything sitting past its terms gets a name against it and a decision route, and unapplied credits on both sides get resolved rather than carried. | Bookkeeper and whoever owns the customer relationship | An aged listing where every stale line has an owner |
| YE minus 7 | Sweep the balances nobody looks at monthly: prepaids, deposits paid, deposits held, accrual accounts carried forward, sales tax and payroll accounts, and the shareholder and related party accounts line by line. | Finance lead | A supporting schedule per account, or a written admission there is not one |
| YE minus 6 | Close out the unknowns from the three weeks above. Anything still unexplained goes into a single escalation list with an owner and a decision date, and that list goes to the owner of the business, not into a folder. | Finance lead, owner reads it | One escalation list, short, with names on it |
The method for those four weeks is set out separately in the balance sheet sweep, which is the account by account version with the evidence each one needs. The point here is the timing. Run it in these weeks and an unknown balance has nine weeks of runway in which somebody can go and find out. Run it after the cut and the same balance has no runway at all, so it gets written off or carried forward, and both of those are decisions made by a deadline rather than by anyone.
One instruction for the whole block, and it is the one people skip. Write the explanation down at the moment you work it out. Not the number, the explanation. Nine weeks later you will remember that the deposit account is fine and you will not remember why, and the second time you work it out costs the same as the first.
Block three, YE minus 5 to YE minus 3: the things that live outside the ledger
The ledger is now stable enough to work against the physical world and the contract file, which is what this block does. It is also the block with the longest lead times inside it, which is why it sits here rather than later.
| Week | What happens | Who | What closes the week |
|---|---|---|---|
| YE minus 5 | Bring the capital asset register up to date against the ledger: additions posted this year matched to their invoices, disposals recorded, work in progress either placed in service or still legitimately in progress. If there is no register, this is not a week’s work, and the rebuild is a project of its own. | Finance lead | A register that ties to the ledger control account, or a scoped rebuild with a date |
| YE minus 4 | Find the leases and the long term commitments, all of them, by searching rather than by asking. Extract the terms into a register and send it to your accountant with the question about classification attached, because that question has a lead time and you want it answered before the cut. | Finance lead | A commitment register, sent, with the open questions listed |
| YE minus 3 | Count the assets, or count the zones you have decided to count this year. Produce the count sheets, the exceptions and the memo while you are standing there, because none of the three can be produced afterwards. | Operations, with finance | Signed count sheets and an exceptions list |
Week YE minus 4 is placed there deliberately. A lease question sent to your accountant in this week comes back in time to affect how the year is closed. The same question asked after the cut becomes a query in the file, and a query in the file is answered under time pressure by the person who is also trying to close six other queries.
The count in week YE minus 3 is early on purpose too. It is not meant to land on the year end date and it does not have to, provided you record what moved between the count and the cut. Counting three weeks out means the exceptions can actually be investigated, which is the only reason to count at all. Counting on the last day of the year produces a list of exceptions that get resolved by assumption.
Block four, YE minus 2 to YE minus 1: stop the ledger moving
Two weeks, and almost none of it is finance work. It is telling other people what happens at the cut.
| Week | What happens | Who | What closes the week |
|---|---|---|---|
| YE minus 2 | Issue the cut-off instructions in writing to everyone who can create a transaction. What is the last day goods can be received into this year, the last day an invoice can be raised into it, the last day an expense claim will be accepted, and what happens to anything arriving after. Confirm the count arrangements if inventory is material to you. | Finance lead, with operations and sales | A one page cut-off notice, sent |
| YE minus 1 | Chase the documents that only arrive when asked for: supplier statements for your larger accounts, the confirmations of anything held by a third party, signed contracts that were agreed verbally, and the minutes of anything the directors resolved this year. | Finance lead and owner | The last of the outside paper, in hand |
Cut-off is the single most common source of adjustments at a first review engagement, and it is a communication failure rather than an accounting one. The people who determine your cut-off are not in finance. They are the person who books deliveries and the person who raises invoices, and neither of them has been told, in most companies, that the date matters at all.
The three things that genuinely cannot be done afterwards
Everything else in this calendar can be done late at a cost. These three cannot be done late at any cost, which is the reason to protect their weeks first if the quarter goes wrong.
Existence. Whether an asset was there is a question about a moment that has passed. You can count next quarter, but you will be counting next quarter, and the difference has to be explained rather than observed. The count and the evidence that it happened is the same day’s work either way; only the value differs.
Cut-off. A transaction sits on one side of the line or the other, and once both periods are open the argument for where it belongs becomes an argument rather than a fact. There is no retrospective version of a cut-off notice.
Contemporaneous explanation. Why a balance is what it is, written by the person who knew, at the time they knew. Reconstructed explanations are how a file ends up with an accrual nobody actually reconsidered, and an outside reader can usually tell the difference.
What is deliberately not in this calendar
The close itself, the fieldwork, the statements, the return, the annual lender package and the post mortem all sit after the year end, and they are the other calendar. Putting them here would suggest they can be pulled forward, and they cannot. What can be pulled forward is every input they depend on, which is the entire content of the thirteen weeks above.
One row does belong in both, though, and it is worth naming now rather than discovering later. Every year end produces a list of things your accountant asked for that took days to assemble. That list is the next year’s version of this calendar. Move three of its items into the monthly close each year and within a couple of cycles this quarter stops being a project and becomes a review.
What we do not do
We do not run this calendar as a checklist emailed to a bookkeeper, because half of it is asking other people uncomfortable questions and a bookkeeper has no standing to ask them.
We do not compress block two when the first two blocks slip. We move the year end preparation ahead of the budget build, and if that is not acceptable we say plainly which of the two is going to be done badly.
We do not perform audits, reviews or compilations, and nothing in these thirteen weeks is any of those things. This is the company getting its own house in order before the person who does perform them arrives.
And we do not put a date in a client’s year end calendar without confirming it for that specific corporation. Every deadline referenced anywhere in this piece is deliberately structural, because a remembered date in a calendar is how a company misses one.