A monthly close and AR report package
A monthly close and AR report package: a cash-cycle waterfall, receivables aging by entity, match exceptions, tie-outs, and a day-by-day close calendar.
55 days in inventory plus 44 days waiting on customers, less 32 days of vendor credit, nets to a 67-day cash conversion cycle. All three ratios use average balances, so one large invoice at month end cannot swing them. Company-wide, the numbers look fine. The entity filter tells a different story.
Synthetic data. Seeded generator, no real company. The working version is the finance operations dashboard, where the filter is a button.
What the roll-up hides
The branch acquired in month 7 opened with 56.6 percent of its receivables past due. Six months later it was 26.9 percent, a mix shift out of the aging bands into Current as it adopted the company's dunning cadence and credit holds.
| Month | DSO (days) | Match auto-clear | Close (days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| M7 | 60.3 | 77.6% | 9.2 |
| M8 | 56.8 | 79.5% | 9.4 |
| M9 | 54.2 | 83.5% | 8.3 |
| M10 | 51.5 | 84.2% | 8 |
| M11 | 47.5 | 85.2% | 7.2 |
| M12 | 44.7 | 88.3% | 6.6 |
Company DSO peaked at 46 days and barely registered the acquisition. The branch's own DSO opened at 60 and converged on the company, while its match auto-clear rate and close time improved alongside. Three healthy branches dilute the one that needs attention.
Acquired is not the same as worst
The worst past-due rate belongs to South, a legacy branch, not the acquired one. A report that only watches the new entity would miss it.
The package
- Cash conversion cycle: DSO, DPO and DIO in one waterfall, so the lever that moved is visible.
- Receivables aging by entity: five buckets by month, filterable to any branch.
- Three-way-match exceptions: 2,466 invoice lines last month, 89.8 percent auto-cleared, about 250 routed by reason code to an owner.
- Close checklist and tie-outs: 47 of 52 tasks done; three of four subledger-to-GL reconciliations tie within a few hundred dollars, and intercompany carries an open $12,840 break.
The close calendar
- Day -3: freeze the subledgers and tell every branch the cutoff.
- Day 0: snapshot open AR, open AP and the trial balance. Everything downstream reads the snapshot.
- Day +1: run the match queue. Price variances go to the PO's buyer, quantity and receipt gaps to the receiving dock, no-PO invoices to the AP supervisor, duplicates to the AP supervisor with payment held.
- Day +2: rebuild aging from the snapshot and flag anything that crossed into 61 to 90 or 90+.
- Day +3: tie out bank, AP, AR and intercompany to the GL, with the dollar difference and reconciling items on every fail.
- Day +4: every break over threshold gets an owner and a due date.
- Day +5: sign-off by someone other than the preparer, with identity and timestamp appended, never edited.
Leave a real break visible. A close screen where everything passes every month means the tolerances are loose or nobody is checking; the intercompany difference stays on the dashboard, in dollars, until it is resolved.