Month-end close now reconciles the ledger, chases the approvals and receipts, and flags the odd one out — so close starts clean and finishes early.
Month-end was a week-long grind. The team matched Stripe payouts to invoices by hand, reconciled bank feeds line by line, and spent days chasing managers for expense approvals and employees for missing receipts.
Close always slipped, and the controller ended up doing the real review work at 11pm — long after the easy 90% should have already been cleared.
Rather than throw bodies at close, the team handed the whole month-end over. On the first business day Unify kicks off on its own, reconciles the easy 90%, chases the stragglers, and brings the controller in only for the calls that truly need judgment.
Created once, in plain language — “on the first business day each month, reconcile the books and chase what’s missing.” Unify turned that into a standing task: no cron expression, no glue code, no extra service to babysit.
Every month it kicks itself off and walks the same close:
Here’s the close as it actually unfolded — stage by stage, down to how it reached for each app. Only the exceptions ever made it to a human.
Kicked itself off and pulled everything that needs matching into one place before the team had coffee.
Cleared the 90% that should just match, leaving only what actually needs a person.
Chased the stragglers that usually eat days — approvals in Slack, receipts by email.
Caught the judgment calls — a double-posted bill and a miscode — and queued them with the evidence.
Drafted the recurring accruals and journal entries and handed over a one-screen close summary.
Controller cleared the three exceptions and posted — a day and a half in, instead of a week of late nights. Summary posted to the finance channel.
Run events and the controller’s replies land on the left. Watch each one get worked end to end across the books — turning to a human only for the exceptions.
By the time I sit down for close, the easy 90% is already done and all that’s left is the handful of things that actually need my judgment. We post in a day and a half now.
Figures shared with permission; some operational details anonymised at the customer’s request.
Copy the brief below and paste it into Unify. It’ll walk you through the prerequisites, connect what it needs, and stand the workflow up with you.
I'm the controller on a small B2B SaaS finance team, and month-end close eats a week — matching Stripe payouts to invoices by hand, reconciling line by line, chasing managers for approvals and employees for receipts. The real review work doesn't start until late, after the easy 90% should already be cleared. Run month-end close. Apps/channels: QuickBooks (ledger), Stripe (payouts, fees, refunds), Slack (chasing approvals), email (chasing receipts). Kick off on the morning of the first business day of each month. Each run: 1. Open the period ledger in QuickBooks and pull the month's Stripe payouts, fees and refunds. 2. Match against the ledger and auto-clear the lines that cleanly reconcile. 3. Chase the rest — Slack managers for approvals, email employees for receipts, follow up until they're in, and recode anything miscoded. 4. Flag exceptions (duplicate bills, unusual amounts, wrong GL codes) and queue them for me with source docs attached. 5. Draft the recurring accruals and journal entries, then hand me a one-screen close summary to review and post. Only the exceptions should reach me; clear the clean 90% yourself.
Tell us the job that never gets done before close. We'll wire it up on a call and you can watch it work.
