Closing a period means saying "these numbers are final" and locking them so nothing can quietly change afterwards. TaDa Books looks for the loose ends first, and refuses to lock a period while anything is outstanding that would make its numbers untrue.
On Home: the close at a glance
Home shows Close <last month> as five steps in a row, each green once it is done and amber with a count while it is not: Book the bank lines (every line through the month end categorized), Reconcile (every bank and card account reconciled through the month end; the button opens the first one still to do), Post the monthly entries (prepaids, accruals and depreciation due through the month), Review (suggested corrections waiting, and a button that runs Books health), and Lock, which opens the proper close below. Nothing on Home posts or locks anything; each button opens the screen where the step is done.
Where it is
Open the company, go to Settings, and under Lock the books click Close a period properly. The date field beside it still works on its own, and always will, but the checklist is the front door.
Picking the period
The window opens on last month, because that is the one people close. The Month, Quarter and Year buttons snap the dates for you, and they follow your company's own financial year: if your year starts in July, the first quarter ends in September, not March.
Periods close in order. If your books are closed through December and you pick February, TaDa Books asks you to close January first, so no month is ever locked without its checks.
What it checks
Six things stop the close. Each one means the period's numbers are not yet true, so locking would freeze a wrong answer.
Bank lines still waiting. Money moved through the bank and is not in the books. Until every line up to the end of the period is categorized or excluded, the profit for the month is a guess.
Drafts nobody decided. Entries TaDa Books drafted for you and nobody accepted or rejected: manager statement postings, rent charges, late fees. Each is either real money missing from the period, or a draft that should be thrown away.
Accounts nobody proved. An account that moved during the period and has not been reconciled through the end of it. Nothing has confirmed that your books and the bank agree. Accounts that sat still are not asked about.
Money parked in the wrong place. A balance sitting in an account money only passes through: Opening Balance Equity, Undeposited Funds, or an account you marked as a clearing account. A balance left there at month end means something never reached where it belongs.
A month never imported. An account that was busy in the three months before the period, with a month inside it that has no bank lines at all. Almost always a statement nobody uploaded or a feed that stopped. This one is invisible everywhere else, because there is nothing there to look at.
The ledger disagreeing with itself. Debits and credits that do not add up to the same number. This should be impossible, and if it ever appears, nothing else matters until it is understood. Do not close; tell us.
What it mentions but does not block
Four more things are worth seeing before you lock a month, and none of them make the numbers wrong:
- Entries with no class, if your company asks for one. The totals are right; reports that split by class will be short.
- Entries with no paperwork, from the date your company started expecting it. Entries you marked as never going to have any are not counted.
- Payments not applied to anything. The cash is right; the customer's balance is not, and the statement you send them will look wrong.
- Still open from this period. Invoices and bills dated inside it that are still unpaid. Nothing to fix, just worth seeing.
Opening a check
Click any check that found something and it opens the actual rows, with dates and amounts, paged like every other table. Twelve outstanding lines is a useless number without knowing which twelve. If a check found more than a hundred, the window says so; the count is always the real total.
Letting the close assistant draft the fixes
When money is parked in a pass-through account, the checklist shows a Draft the fixes button. The close assistant looks at each parked balance and drafts the correcting entry for you:
- A clearing account is split by payee. When a payee's entries over the last year went to one income or expense account most of the time, its open amount is drafted to that account, and the window shows the evidence ("4 of 4 of their entries in the last year went there"). What the history cannot place, such as amounts entered with no payee, is left for you, and the window says why.
- Opening Balance Equity is drafted to Retained Earnings, for the exact balance. Approve that one only once every opening balance is in.
- Undeposited Funds is never drafted. Payments waiting there are cleared with Record deposit, so the bank can match them.
Tick the accounts you want and press Send to Suggestions. Nothing is posted: each draft waits under Transactions > Suggestions until someone who can change the books approves or declines it. Every amount is a sum of posted lines, so what is drafted plus what is left always equals the balance. A draft already waiting is not drafted twice. The rest of the checklist is listed at the bottom with where each one is fixed, because a correcting entry would only hide a missing statement or an unreconciled account.
The assistant runs only while AI assistance is on for your account (Plan page), and each draft it sends is on the AI activity list there.
Closing anyway
Sometimes a period has to close before everything is tidy: a statement that will never arrive, a dispute nobody can settle this month. That is allowed, but only for the owner of the books, and only with a written reason. The reason is kept with the close forever, so whoever reads these books next understands the decision instead of guessing at it.
What closing records
TaDa Books keeps a record of every close: the period, what the checklist found at that moment, who closed it, and any reason given for closing over a problem. A lock date on its own can tell you a period is shut. It cannot tell you whether the books were clean when they were signed off, and that is the question an accountant asks a year later.
Reopening
Owners can reopen a closed period with a reason. Periods open in the reverse of the order they closed: if July and then August were both closed, August must be reopened before July can be - otherwise reopening July would quietly unlock August too. The lock goes back to where it was before that close, never earlier than a period that is still closed, and the original record is kept and stamped with who reopened it and why. Nothing is deleted.
While a period is closed, the lock date in Settings cannot be moved before its end or cleared; reopen the period first. Moving the lock date earlier, or moving the closed tax year back, is the owner's call, like reopening. And if you moved the lock date later by hand after closing, reopening asks you to bring it back first, so it never unlocks a month you locked yourself.
After the lock
Nothing dated on or before the lock date can be added, changed or voided until the period is reopened. That applies everywhere: the register, bank feeds, invoices, bills, rent charges and imports all respect it.
Books health: the same checks, any day
You do not have to be closing a month to ask whether the books are all right. On the Overview, the green Books health button runs every check above over the last twelve complete months, and adds three that matter any day:
- Entries dated far in the future: more than 60 days ahead, almost always a typo in the year, so the money is missing from the month it belongs to.
- Entries that look recorded twice: the same kind of entry, on the same day, for the same payee, moving the same bank or card account by the same amount, with the same class. Sometimes real, often one payment entered twice. The same bill for two different properties (two classes) is never counted.
- Balances out of step: the running month totals disagree with the entries. Rebuild the totals right on the card fixes it.
The window gives one grade: Healthy, Healthy, with some tidying (only things that are untidy but do not change the numbers), or Needs attention (something means the numbers are not yet true). Unpaid invoices and bills are shown for your information and never change the grade.
From a finding to the fix
- Every row opens its own item: the entry, the payment, the invoice or bill, that bank account's For Review or Reconcile screen, or an account's entries. Entries and documents open on top of Books health; fix one, close it, and Books health checks again by itself.
- Show these entries in Transactions lists exactly the entries a check found, whatever their dates, under a band naming the check, with Check again, Back to Books health and Show all transactions. Fix an entry from that list and the check runs again by itself: what you fixed drops off and the count goes down. Reclassify opened from that list starts on the lines of exactly those entries, so giving them all a class is one tick and one press.
- Bank findings get a button per account, such as "Review 30 in Chase Checking".
- Suspected duplicates are shown side by side, each entry saying where it was booked and how it got in (typed in, from the bank feed, imported). Void the copy, or press These are both real: the group stops counting until another identical entry joins it, and Bring them back undoes it.
- Money between your companies, booked apart has Leave as is, the same set-aside the between-companies screen uses, for both companies.
The month-end checks cover the last twelve complete months, starting after the date the books are closed through: closed months were checked when they were closed. Duplicates and far-future dates are looked for up to today. Anyone who can open the books can run the window and open the items read only; marking and rebuilding need edit access.