Why accounting's most familiar deadline is disappearing

Ask your controller when the books for October will be closed, and the answer will come automatically: November 5, or maybe November 8 if there are complications. After all, you can't release financials until every transaction is reconciled, every journal entry's posted, and every variance is explained. This all takes time. The month-end close is accounting's most enduring ritual; a hard deadline that impacts workflows, sets review cycles, and tells your finance team when they can finally breathe.

But the thing is, the month-end close isn't a true accounting standard. It's actually an artifact of batch-processing constraints that disappeared over a decade ago. This is confirmed by the SEC's Financial Reporting Manual, which doesn't mandate monthly closes. As far as the SEC's concerned, only timely quarterly and annual reporting for public companies is needed.

The problem with batch thinking

The month-end close emerged from physical necessity rather than accounting theory. When bank statements arrived by mail once a month, you reconciled once a month. When subledgers lived in paper journals, you consolidated them when the files were available. When posting to the general ledger meant literal posting — writing figures into bound volumes — you worked in batches to avoid too many errors and edits. 

These constraints made sense for decades, but they vanished around 2010. Since then, modern bank feeds update in real time. Subledgers sync automatically. Modern general ledger software accepts entries instantly, with audit trails and reversal capabilities. According to recent AICPA research, automated feeds and real-time ledgers are now standard features in continuous close implementations.

Yet, many finance teams still do batch work. Transactions accumulate for 25 days, then there's a scramble: five days of reconciling, posting, and investigating variances that were unresolved for weeks. By the time an issue surfaces, context is lost. These rituals carry on because the profession never paused to ask whether the constraints that created it still apply. They don't.

The shift to stream-based accounting

Smart finance teams are adopting continuous close models, with Big Four firm clients reporting strong upward trends over the past five years. At one midsized manufacturing company, the controller reviews yesterday's transactions every morning, then exceptions are investigated immediately and reconciliations are cleared by lunch.

Transactions from yesterday's bank feeds are reconciled the following afternoon. Vendor payment exceptions surface in hours, not weeks. Journal entries post as soon as the context is clear, with approvals often handled through collaboration platforms rather than waiting for a monthly meeting.

According to the 2025 AICPA Survey on Continuous Finance, firms implementing automated reconciliation achieved a 60-70% reduction in manual reconciliation workload. Issues are caught while the context is fresh, and a duplicate payment is resolved within a day, rather than waiting weeks and sifting through emails for answers. This changes how accountants allocate their time: Instead of catching up for five days each month, they keep current throughout the period. Books become "always current" rather than "finally closed."

What this means for CPAs

For accounting firms, this evolution rewrites the audit calendar. Where continuous close is practiced, interim reviews become more meaningful than year-end verification. Continuous close shifts focus to concurrent monitoring rather than solely retrospective confirmation. You're confirming that daily entry processes are sound, exception handling is consistent, and controls operate as designed. The work becomes more valuable because findings are actionable in real time, not months after the fact.

It's important to note that, while regulators like the SEC and FASB do not specifically require monthly closes, some sectors and public companies maintain monthly cycles for internal control and audit readiness.

For clients, financial statements are always in draft status — which doesn't mean they're incomplete, but rather that they're always up-to-date and ready to be refined as new information comes in. For CPAs, the opportunity lies in designing processes that surface exceptions immediately, rather than only verifying outputs at the end of a period.

Moving toward continuous close

Transitioning doesn't require a full system overhaul. It makes sense to automate reconciliations for bank accounts, credit cards and high-volume subledgers because these consume the most time during a typical close. The 2025 AICPA survey found that organizations automating bank, credit card and AP ledger reconciliations saw a 30-40% decrease in close-window workload.

Next, compress review cycles from monthly to weekly: Review exceptions and unusual entries from the past week, with problems resolved while the context is fresh. Small issues stay small and never turn into a month-end emergency.

Closing insight

When someone asks, "When will October's books be closed?" the question itself reveals outdated assumptions. The right question is whether books are current enough to support today's decisions. For controllers using continuous close models, the traditional month-end still happens, but as a checkpoint, not the main deadline. Reconciling, posting and investigating now occurs in daily increments. What used to require five days of concentrated effort now takes 30 minutes of daily maintenance, plus a few hours of monthly review.

The close still happens, but it's shifted into daily rhythms. What remains is review and confirmation — which is what the close was meant to be.