Year-End Automation Checklist for Finance Teams

Year-end close is the most stressful period for any finance team, and most of the pain is self-inflicted. Not because the team is incompetent, but because the processes that feed the close are manual, disconnected, and dependent on heroic effort rather than reliable systems. When your reconciliations, 1099 preparation, accrual calculations, and audit documentation are all manual tasks, the last two weeks of the year become a nightmare of late nights and last-minute surprises.

This checklist breaks the year-end close into automatable tasks organized by timeline. Start working on these automations in Q3 so they are tested and running before the December crunch arrives.

Start in Q3 with preparation, run a trial close in November, then execute the final close in December

Reconciliation Automations

Reconciliation is the backbone of a clean close. When done manually, it is also the biggest time sink. Here is what to automate.

• Bank reconciliation matching. Set up automated matching rules in QuickBooks or your accounting platform to auto-match deposits, withdrawals, and fees against your ledger. Rules should handle exact matches, partial matches within a tolerance, and batch deposits that aggregate multiple transactions.
• Accounts receivable aging alerts. Automate weekly AR aging reports starting in October. Flag any invoices over 60 days and trigger escalation emails to both your collections team and the customer. Clearing AR before year-end prevents write-off surprises.
• Accounts payable cutoff verification. Build a workflow that captures all invoices received in the last two weeks of December and routes them for period assignment review. This ensures expenses are recorded in the correct fiscal year.
• Intercompany reconciliation. For multi-entity businesses, automate the matching of intercompany transactions and flag discrepancies immediately rather than discovering them during consolidation.

Tax Preparation Automations

1099 preparation is a perfect automation candidate because it relies entirely on data that already exists in your systems, just not in the right format.

• Vendor payment aggregation. Automate a report that sums payments to each vendor for the calendar year, filtered by 1099-eligible payment types. Run this monthly starting in October to catch any coding errors while there is still time to fix them.
• W-9 completeness check. Trigger automated W-9 requests to any vendor who has received over $400 in payments but has no W-9 on file. Start this in September. Chasing W-9s in January is a miserable experience nobody needs.
• Sales tax reconciliation. Automate a comparison between sales tax collected per your e-commerce platform, sales tax recorded in your accounting system, and sales tax filed on returns. Discrepancies compound over the year and become expensive to unwind at year-end.

Accrual and Adjustment Automations

Accruals require judgment, but the underlying calculations and postings can be automated.

• Recurring accrual entries. Set up automated journal entries for predictable accruals: rent, insurance, SaaS subscriptions, and employee benefits. These should post automatically on the last day of each month and reverse on the first day of the next.
• Revenue recognition calculations. If you have deferred revenue or multi-period contracts, automate the recognition schedule so monthly amounts are calculated and posted without manual intervention. This is especially important for businesses using automated invoicing where billing and recognition do not always align.
• Depreciation schedules. Automate monthly depreciation entries based on your fixed asset register. Year-end is not the time to discover that six months of depreciation was never posted.

Audit Readiness Automations

Whether you face an external audit or just want clean books, audit readiness automation saves weeks of scrambling.

• Document archival workflow. Automate the organization and archival of supporting documents: signed contracts, purchase orders, vendor invoices, and bank statements. When your auditor asks for the backup on a specific transaction, you should be able to retrieve it in under a minute.
• Trial balance generation. Schedule automated trial balance reports at month-end with comparison to prior period and budget. Deliver these to the finance team automatically so variances are caught in real time, not during the annual review.
• Variance analysis reports. Build automated variance reports that flag any account with a balance change exceeding a defined threshold. Route these for investigation immediately rather than explaining them to auditors months later.

Typical results from finance teams that automate their year-end close processes

Year-end close should not be a crisis. If it feels like one, you have a process problem that automation can solve. Start early, automate incrementally, and test everything before December.

For ongoing maintenance of your financial automations, combine this checklist with our quarterly automation review process. And use our cost calculator to estimate exactly how much your current manual year-end process is costing you.