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Close Month

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Streamline your month-end financial closing process.

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Free · Opens the source repo

What Close Month does

Close Month is a bash-based skill designed to automate the month-end close workflow for businesses using QuickBooks and various payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, and Square. This skill effectively reconciles transactions, flags discrepancies, generates a plain-English Profit & Loss (P&L) narrative, and exports a comprehensive close packet for record-keeping. It is particularly useful for small business owners and accountants who need to ensure accurate financial reporting at the end of each month.

The skill operates in a structured four-step process. First, it reconciles QuickBooks transactions with payment processor settlements to identify any gaps in records. It highlights unmatched transactions and variances, allowing users to quickly spot issues that need attention. In the second step, it flags suspicious entries such as uncategorized transactions and potential duplicates, ensuring that users can address these items before finalizing their financial statements.

Once the owner has reviewed and triaged flagged items, the skill generates a narrative that summarizes the month’s financial performance, including revenue, margin, and notable transactions. This narrative provides valuable insights into the business's financial health and helps inform future decisions. Finally, the skill exports a detailed close packet in both Excel and PDF formats, containing all relevant reconciliation data, flagged items, and the P&L narrative, which can be saved to a specified location such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or the local desktop.

Close Month is ideal for businesses looking to simplify their month-end closing process, reduce errors, and gain clearer insights into their financial performance. By automating these tasks, users can save time and ensure that their financial records are accurate and up-to-date.

When to use it

Use Close Month at the end of each month to efficiently reconcile transactions and generate financial reports.

When not to use it

This skill is not suitable for businesses that do not use QuickBooks or require complex multi-currency reconciliations.

What you can build with it

Monthly Financial Review

Use Close Month to automate the reconciliation of your financial records at the end of each month, ensuring accuracy before reporting.

Identifying Financial Discrepancies

Quickly flag and address discrepancies between QuickBooks and payment processor records, reducing the risk of errors in financial statements.

Generating Financial Reports

Easily generate a comprehensive P&L narrative and export detailed reports for your accountant or for internal review.

How to install Close Month

View source

1. Install with the skills CLI

npx skills add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins/close-month --agent claude-code

2. Or install it manually

Download the skill folder and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects, or .claude/skills/ to scope it to one repo. Restart Claude Code so it picks up the new skill.

Anthropic's agentic coding CLI, and the reference implementation of Agent Skills. Drop a skill folder into ~/.claude/skills and Claude Code loads it automatically whenever a task matches the skill's description. Claude Code docs

Inside SKILL.md

Written by anthropics

Run the month-end close workflow. Reconcile, flag gaps, narrate the P&L, and export the close packet for the owner's records (and their accountant).

Parse arguments:

  • --month (default: previous calendar month) — YYYY-MM format
  • --save-to (default files) — files (Google Drive / OneDrive), desktop (local), or both

Step 1 — Reconcile

Trigger the month-end-prep skill workflow:

  1. Pull all QuickBooks transactions for the target month.
  2. Pull settlements from each connected payment processor (PayPal, Stripe, Square) for the same month.
  3. Match QB entries to processor settlements by amount + date (±2 days).
  4. Surface three gap categories:
    • Unmatched processor settlements — money came in via PayPal/Stripe/Square but never landed in QB
    • Unmatched QB deposits — QB shows income with no processor record (cash? wire? misclassified?)
    • Variance lines — matched but amount differs (fees, refunds split)

Step 2 — Flag suspicious entries

Surface in the same report:

  • Uncategorized transactions — QB entries with no category
  • Suspicious duplicates — same amount, same vendor, within 3 days
  • Missing receipts — QB entries above $75 with no attachment

For each, recommend an action: categorize as X, delete duplicate, attach receipt from inbox.

Wait for owner to triage flagged items before generating the narrative. Do not auto-categorize or auto-delete.

Step 3 — P&L narrative

After triage, generate a plain-English P&L narrative:

{Month YYYY} closed at ${revenue} revenue ({+/-}{X}% vs prior month).
Top driver: {category/customer}. Biggest swing: {category} {direction} ${amount}
because {reason inferred from transactions}.

Margin: {X}% ({+/-}Y pts vs prior). {Cost-side commentary}.

Three notable items:
1. ...
2. ...
3. ...

Numbers come from QB; the why comes from cross-referencing top transactions, vendor names, and prior-month deltas.

Step 4 — Export the close packet

Generate two files:

  1. close-packet-{YYYY-MM}.xlsx — multi-tab workbook:
    • Reconciliation — QB ↔ processor match table with gap rows highlighted
    • Flagged — uncategorized / duplicates / missing receipts
    • P&L — formatted income statement with prior-month delta column
    • Trial Balance — accounts + ending balances
  2. close-packet-{YYYY-MM}.pdf — one-page summary: P&L narrative + top-line numbers + gap count

Save both to the chosen --save-to location. Filename format: close-packet-2026-04.xlsx etc.

Connector failures

If QuickBooks is unreachable, stop — reconciliation requires QB as the source of truth. If a payment processor (PayPal, Stripe, Square) is unreachable, run reconciliation against the available processors and note "PayPal not connected — PayPal settlements skipped from reconciliation" (or whichever is missing). If all processors are missing, run QB-only analysis and flag it.

Approval gates

  • Never auto-fix flagged items. Always show the gap, recommend an action, wait for the owner.
  • Never delete duplicates without explicit confirmation. Show both records side-by-side.
  • Saving the packet is auto — it goes to the owner's own drive.

Output

End the run with a one-paragraph recap: revenue, margin, gap count remaining (if any), file paths to the saved packet. If gaps were not all resolved, list them so the owner can revisit.

Frequently asked questions about Close Month

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