Close Accruals & Reserves Completeness Tracker
Keep one living register of every recurring close accrual and reserve — bonus, commission, bad-debt, warranty — let AI compute each from its basis, tell you which are booked and which are missing this period, and export the entries plus auto-reversals only after the controller approves.
A web tool where you keep your recurring accruals and reserves as a register, import the period's actuals and a list of what's already booked, and let AI compute each accrual from its basis (formula or estimate). It builds a booked-vs-not checklist, flags any standard accrual missing this period, and shows the controller a completeness view. The controller reviews each amount and approves, and the tool exports GL-ready entries, their auto-reversals, and an accruals completeness report.
Before you start
- A Supabase account (free)
- A Vercel account (free)
- Your standing accrual/reserve register (name, basis, accounts, frequency) as a sheet or CSV
- The period's supporting actuals and your already-booked GL/journal export (CSV is fine)
- Claude Code or any AI coding agent
The problem this kills
Every close has the same quiet risk: the accrual nobody remembered. The commission accrual, the bonus pool, the bad-debt reserve, the warranty reserve, the property-tax accrual that only hits some periods — they live in your head, in last month's binder, and in a tab of a workbook that one person maintains. Most periods you catch them all. The one period you don't, the P&L is wrong, the auditor finds it, and you're explaining a missed accrual to the CFO.
So you do it by memory and muscle. Open last period's journal, recompute each accrual from its basis, eyeball whether it got booked, re-key the entries, and remember to reverse the ones that reverse. It's repetitive, it's the same every month, and the failure mode is silent — a missing entry leaves no error to trip over. Completeness, not arithmetic, is the hard part.
This is exactly the kind of recurring, rules-based, high-stakes checklist that a small internal tool does better than a spreadsheet — and you do not need to be a developer to build it.
What you'll build
A simple internal web tool for your close. You keep one living register of every recurring accrual and reserve — its name, its basis (a formula like "1.5% of net sales" or an estimate like the warranty reserve), its debit and credit accounts, how often it's due, and whether it auto-reverses. Each period you start a close run, import the period's supporting actuals and a list of what's already booked in the GL, and the tool computes every accrual from its basis.
Then it does the part that actually saves you: it lines up what should be booked against what is booked and produces a completeness checklist — booked, missing, or a material variance from what you computed — so the accrual you forgot lights up red. The controller reviews each proposed amount on one screen, overrides the estimates that need judgment, and clicks Approve. Only then does the tool produce GL-ready journal entries, their matching auto-reversals for next period, and an accruals completeness report you keep as support.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — what's on your accrual register today, which accruals are formula-based versus estimates, which supporting numbers feed each formula, how you tell whether something's already booked, your frequency and reversal conventions, and your nastiest edge cases — and then tailors the data model, the calculations, and every later step to your answers. This is a build shaped around your close, not a generic template.
From there it walks the agent through the database schema, loading your register, the period imports with their duplicate guards, the compute-and-completeness engine, the controller's review-and-approve screen, and the export of the entries, the auto-reversals, and the completeness report. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. Because the whole thing runs on CSV in and GL-ready CSV out, you can build and use it this weekend even if you have no direct connection to your ERP.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This touches the general ledger, so it's built like it matters: login so only your finance team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own entity's data, and a complete audit trail of every register change, import, edit, approval, and export — who did what, and when. Nothing posts automatically: each accrual is a draft until the controller approves it, and approval is the hard human-in-the-loop gate before anything becomes a journal entry. Duplicate guards on accrual-plus-period mean the same accrual can't be proposed twice in a period, and your already-booked import is deduped so the booked-vs-not check stays honest.
Who it's for
Controllers and staff accountants who own the monthly, quarterly, and annual close and want the accruals and reserves to be complete, defensible, and computed the same way every period. If you can list your recurring accruals and explain how each one is calculated, you can build this.
You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and let it interview you about your close.