Closing a period means saying "these numbers are final" and locking them so nothing can quietly change afterwards. kBooks looks for the loose ends first, and refuses to lock a period while anything is outstanding that would make its numbers untrue.
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, kBooks 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 kBooks 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
kBooks 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 and the same amount. Sometimes real, often one payment entered twice.
- Balances out of step: the running month totals disagree with the entries. Verify balances in Books Settings rebuilds them.
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). Each finding says what it means, lists the entries behind it, and has a button to the screen where it is fixed. The current month is left out of the month-end checks because it cannot be reconciled until its statement arrives. Nothing in the window changes your books, so anyone who can open them can run it.