Month-end close checklist: nine steps to close the month with your tax advisor
A large part of the month-end close happens inside your company, before anything reaches your tax advisor (Steuerberater). In many growing companies, the steps of this internal close are not written down anywhere and are all done by hand last minute. The knowledge lives with the person who usually does the close, which works until that person is away in the first week of the month and you are suddenly late. Here is the list, in the order the work is done.
The checklist, in order
1. Complete invoice and receipt capture
A booking needs proof, and a month close needs all its invoices: On the cost side, German bookkeeping rules (GoBD) require that no booking goes without an invoice, so every card payment without a receipt comes back as a question from your tax advisor. The sooner it is reconciled, the easier it is, because whoever internally paid or approved the expense still remembers what it was for and where the invoice is. The same completeness applies on the revenue side: every delivery and service of the month gets its outgoing invoice, because unbilled work understates the month, which triggers questions from your tax advisor and no later step on this list catches it.
2. Reconcile bank and card accounts
Every transaction, across all your bank and card accounts, gets matched to its invoice or receipt. Matching is usually the largest step: done by hand, for a typical 50 to 60 person tech company in Germany, which processes roughly 300 to 700 transactions a month it takes roughly 10 to 45 hours. Going through your inbox, or chasing someone in some other department that has the proof you need, is what takes time.
3. Review open items and run dunning
Go through your lists of open invoices for purchasing and sales, so that everything that was paid is marked as paid. One founder described the underlying problem to us: money comes in, and it is a manual process to record that it has arrived. When the open items are not kept up to date, your dunning stops working as well, because nobody can tell which reminders are still justified.
4. Post payroll
Even when the payroll run is done by your tax advisor or a payroll provider, its postings have to be in your books for the month, split across the right cost centres. If you file wage tax monthly, which applies once the previous year's wage tax was more than 5,000 euros, that return is due on the 10th as well (§ 41a EStG).
5. Book accruals, prepayments and depreciation
Costs that belong to the month but have not been invoiced yet are booked as accruals. Payments made in advance for several months are spread across the months they cover, and depreciation on fixed assets is posted for the month. If these entries are only made at year-end, the monthly results before then are wrong, and missing depreciation makes every month look better than it is.
6. Review cost centre allocations
A report by cost centre is only as good as the allocation of each cost, so check that every cost sits on the right one, including DATEV's second cost centre field (KOST2) if you use it. At one company we spoke to, the ERP has a cost type field that DATEV does not know, so before every export someone copies it into KOST2 with a bulk action, and these are the sort of workarounds that make this whole process longer.
7. Prepare and submit the advance VAT return
The advance VAT return (Umsatzsteuer-Voranmeldung) is built from the month's bookings: the VAT on your sales minus the input VAT on your purchases. It is due on the 10th day after the end of the period (§ 18 UStG), or one month later with the permanent extension (§ 46 UStDV), and a company whose VAT for the previous year was above 9,000 euros files it monthly. Check the figures against the bookings, then submit the return to the tax office. You may do this yourself using your own accounting software. If someone files it for you, that has to be a tax advisor.
8. Lock the period
Once the return is submitted, the month is locked (Festschreibung), so that its bookings can no longer be changed without a logged correction. GoBD requires bookings to become unchangeable, which is generally read as by the end of the following month, and in practice the lock happens at the latest when the advance VAT return is submitted, because the return is based on those bookings. A correction after the lock is booked as a new, reversing entry, so the original stays visible.
9. Export to the tax advisor
Your tax advisor receives the locked month: the bookings on your SKR03 or SKR04 accounts, plus the invoices and receipts for each booking. They review the bookings and post any corrections as new entries. If payroll sits with them, they also file the wage tax return. And they prepare the annual statements and the annual tax returns, as before. If they still send you a business evaluation report (BWA) and a trial balance (SuSa), review both as a check on the same bookings.
Which steps belong in the month instead
Only five of the nine steps have to happen monthly: payroll, which runs once a month, the accruals and depreciation, which belong to the period, the advance VAT return, which needs the complete month, and the lock and the export at the end. Steps 1, 2, 3 and 6 are daily work that tends to be saved up for month-end.
German bookkeeping rules support this, because GoBD expects transactions to be recorded as soon as possible after they occur, considers recording within ten days unobjectionable for non-cash transactions, and requires cash to be recorded daily. Booking them in a batch later is allowed, up to the end of the following month, but only if they were first recorded in time.
At one company we spoke to, the finance team matches payments against open invoices every week, and usually only two or three invoices a week are left over for manual matching. Spread over the month, matching is a short weekly task. Saved up for the first days of the next month, the same work lands in the days before the VAT deadline, together with the rest of the list.
Keeping the list in the system
Agent F is an AI-native ERP built to keep the month current while it runs. Payments are matched as they arrive, and postings are suggested on your cost centres and your SKR03 or SKR04 accounts for your finance team to approve, so by month-end steps 1, 2, 3 and 6 are largely done.
Agent F keeps the close as a task list that the system maintains itself. It suggests the accruals with a confidence score and posts depreciation and prepayments from their schedules. It prepares the advance VAT return from the bookings for you to check and submit to the tax office. Once the return is submitted, the period is locked, and the export for your tax advisor is ready with all bookings and supporting documents. Because the list is generated from the books, it shows what is actually still open, rather than which person is responsible for which task, and anyone on the team with access can see it. Through Agent F, the month-end close process is automated so that your finance team stays lean and can focus on what truly matters
Learn how Agent F works, and book a demo at agent-f.ai/demo.