The agency month-end close: a checklist that ties to the bank

Most agencies do not close a month. They look at a dashboard, pay people, and move on — which works right up until two numbers disagree and there is nothing to check them against.

A close is one specific act: proving your own numbers against something outside your own system. There is only one such thing here, and it is the bank statement.

The close, in order

The order matters. Each step is only true if the one above it was done.

• 1 · Freeze the period. Pick the cutoff and stop editing behind it. Something always arrives late; it belongs to the next period with a note, not backdated into a month you already reported.
• 2 · Pull the statement. Every credit in the window, from the account the payouts actually land in.
• 3 · Match each credit. Credit to creator to expected payout. The unmatched ones are the whole point of this step — a changed bank account, a second platform, a personal transfer somebody made and forgot.
• 4 · Compute commission off the credit. At the contracted rate, on the contracted base. Not off a platform balance, not off last month's rate.
• 5 · Notice, then collect. Written notice of the amount and date before a varying debit, then the debit — in that order, with a gap.
• 6 · Resolve every failure. Nothing may still be sitting in "attempted" when the period closes.
• 7 · Tie out, then spend. Tax set-aside and team payroll come after the three numbers agree, not before.

Every commission in exactly one state

This is the tie-out, and it is the whole close in one table. An example period:

If those three do not sum to the fourth, an amount is in two states or in none. In practice it is in none — see stranded commission, which is the specific way a number disappears from both the owed list and the collected list at once.

Three reconciliations, and they catch different things

• Bank against ledger. Did every credit you booked actually exist, on the date you booked it? This catches optimism.
• Ledger against contract. Is each rate the rate in the signed agreement, on the base it names? This catches drift — a rate changed in a conversation and never in the system.
• This period against last. This one catches the error nobody sees.

The absence of a row is the hardest error to find. A missing invoice never appears on a report of invoices. A creator who earned and was not billed shows up as nothing at all — the only place it is visible is next to the month where they were billed.

So the check is not "do these numbers look right". It is: who was on last month's list and is not on this one? Every name on that difference needs a reason — churned, paused, or broken.

The four things that make this an hour instead of a weekend

• The credit carries an identifier. If you have to guess which creator a deposit belongs to, step 3 is the whole day.
• One state per commission, enforced. Not a spreadsheet column somebody types into.
• Notice goes out automatically. A close where you also have to remember to warn fourteen people is a close that slips.
• The period exports. If your accountant's first question costs you a reconstruction, you did not close, you described.

What "closed" actually means

Not that the numbers look right. That you could hand the period to somebody else and they could rebuild it from documents you already have — statement, contract, notice, result.

That definition is worth adopting for a reason that has nothing to do with tidiness: it is the standard a bank, an acquirer or a buyer will apply to you, and they will apply it in a week when you are busy.

The month-end mistakes that cost real money

• Billing off the platform balance. It is not money yet. The debit fails and you pay for the discovery.
• Paying the team before the tie-out. Overseas payroll is irreversible; a split that has not settled is not.
• Rolling a failure forward silently. Two months of "we'll get it next time" is a conversation nobody wants to have on month three.
• No set-aside. Commission is revenue. A percentage of it was never yours, and the quarter it is due is not the quarter you noticed.

OnlyFlow closes steps 2 through 6 without anybody opening a spreadsheet: it watches the bank rather than a platform, computes off the credit, sends the written notice, and will not let a commission sit in an unresolved state — a permanent failure appears on a list somebody reads instead of quietly leaving the ledger. Step 1 and step 7 are still yours.