The standard pack, by business type
Every monthly pack starts from the same base — bank and card statements for every account in use — but what completes it depends heavily on how the business actually makes money. The four types below cover most of what a small firm’s client roster looks like.
Service & professional firms
The pack is thinner, but accounts receivable and prepaid balances carry more weight than for a retail client.
- An export from the time-tracking or billing platform showing hours logged, invoiced and collected for the month
- The current retainer or prepayment balance, and how much of it was drawn down this period
- An accounts-receivable aging summary so overdue invoices don’t get quietly written off in a journal entry
- Invoices paid to subcontractors or associates engaged for client work during the month
Retail
Reconciling the register to the bank deposit is the whole job — most of the pack exists to make that possible.
- A full-month export from the point-of-sale system, broken out by discount, refund and tender type
- The merchant deposit statement, so processor fees and holdbacks can be separated from gross sales
- A count adjustment note, if a physical inventory count happened this period
- Vendor bills for goods purchased for resale during the month
Restaurant
Tip handling and multi-location vendor spend are where restaurant packs go wrong most often.
- An end-of-month sales recap split by category — dine-in, delivery, and beverage — not a single day’s snapshot
- A record of how tips and service charges were distributed to staff during the period
- Vendor invoices for food and beverage purchases across every location the client operates
- A payroll note flagging whether a tip credit was applied against minimum wage this cycle
Ecommerce
The gap between what a marketplace deposits and what it actually sold is where most misclassifications hide.
- A payout report from every storefront or marketplace, showing gross sales, fees and refunds netted against the deposit
- Invoices from advertising platforms used during the month
- A statement from the shipping carrier or fulfillment partner covering the same period
- A returns log that can be reconciled against the deductions the processor already took
Where the calendar and the source documents disagree
Most misclassified entries in a recurring close don’t come from a missing document — they come from a document that covers the wrong period, applied as if it didn’t. Three patterns account for most of it.
Bank statement cycles rarely match the calendar month
A statement that runs from the 21st to the 20th will pull a week and a half of next month’s activity into the current close if you book it as-is. Decide up front whether your firm reconciles by calendar month using the bank’s transaction-level export, or accepts the statement cycle and adjusts the boundary transactions — and apply the same rule every month, not whichever is convenient.
Biweekly payroll drifts against the calendar
A biweekly schedule produces twenty-six pay dates a year, not twenty-four, so two months each year land a third payroll run inside their boundaries and one month gets none. A pack that assumes 'two payrolls per month' will misstate expense in exactly those months unless the preparer checks the actual pay date against the period, not the pattern from last month.
A processor’s settlement date is not the sale date
Card and marketplace payments frequently settle two to five business days after the transaction, so a sale made on the last day of the month can appear as a deposit in the following one. Left unadjusted, this shows up as a recurring few-hundred-dollar swing that never quite reconciles — the fix is a cutoff rule (accrue or defer) applied consistently, not chased case by case.
When a document is late
A pack with one missing item shouldn’t stall an entire close. Send a reminder that names the specific document still outstanding rather than a general "please send everything" — specific requests get answered faster than open-ended ones. If a deadline passes with an item still missing, book the month with a clearly flagged placeholder for that line and reconcile it against the real figure once the document arrives, rather than holding the whole close hostage to one late statement. Chronic lateness on the same item, month after month, is worth raising directly with the client rather than absorbing quietly as extra review time.
A review checklist for the preparer
Before starting the actual close, five checks catch most of the errors that would otherwise surface during review:
- Every account on the client’s list has a statement for this exact period — not most, all.
- This month’s opening balance on every account matches last month’s closing balance, with no unexplained gap.
- Payroll expense in the ledger matches the payroll register total, not an estimate carried from last month.
- Any transaction over the firm’s review threshold has a plain-language explanation attached, not just a category guess.
- Every open item flagged last month is either resolved this month or explicitly carried forward with a reason.
A sample due-date cadence
| Timing | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Automatic reminder goes out for the prior month’s pack. |
| Day 5 | Most responsive clients have submitted the bulk of documents. |
| Day 10 | Standard due date for a complete pack. |
| Day 12 | First escalation — a specific reminder naming what’s still missing, sent to the backup contact if the primary hasn’t responded. |
| Day 15 | Close proceeds with placeholders for anything still outstanding, flagged for a true-up next cycle. |
Running this checklist in Cohesio
Sending this list by email every month, and re-explaining it to whichever client missed something, is exactly the recurring friction Cohesio’s document collection removes. A monthly pack template holds the business-type-specific requirements above; each new month drafts itself as a fresh engagement, reminders follow the cadence you set, and a reviewer sees exactly what’s outstanding without reopening last month’s thread.