Record-to-Report
Also known as
Accrued expense · Accrued liability
Definition
Related terms
Deferral
Deferring recognition of a cost or revenue already paid or billed until the period it relates to. Prepaid schedules require amortization tracking, and mid-period contract changes are the usual cause of sub-ledger drift.
Reversing Entry
An entry that automatically backs out a prior-period accrual in the following period, so that the actual invoice can post without double-counting. Missed reversals are among the most common and most quietly material close errors.
Cut-Off
The point at which transaction posting for a period closes and everything later belongs to the next period. Cut-off enforcement across AP, AR, payroll, inventory, and fixed assets is the first step of the close and the origin of most period-shifting misstatement.
More in
Record-to-Report
Account Reconciliation
Proving that a GL account balance agrees to independent supporting evidence, with any differences identified and explained. Reconciliations are commonly 30–40% of total close effort, and reconciliation quality — not existence — is what auditors actually test.
Allocation
Distributing shared costs across cost centers, business units, or products using a driver such as headcount, square footage, or revenue. Driver staleness is the standard failure mode — allocations continue running on last year's basis long after the underlying activity has shifted.
Auto-Certification Rate
The share of account reconciliations that clear automatically under defined rules without preparer intervention. Best-in-class organizations reach 75–90%; median performance sits nearer 35–50%. The remainder is where reconciliation labor actually lives.
Bank Reconciliation
Matching ledger cash balances to bank statement activity, identifying timing differences, unrecorded items, and errors. High-volume merchants and marketplace sellers face a harder variant, where settlement files must be decomposed into gross sales, fees, refunds, chargebacks, and FX before matching is even possible.
Chart of Accounts (COA)
The structured list of accounts and reporting dimensions — entity, cost center, department, project, product — used to classify every transaction. COA design determines what questions the ledger can answer, and post-acquisition COA divergence is one of the hardest problems in multi-entity close.
Close Calendar
The sequenced task plan for the close, with owners, dependencies, and deadlines. On-time task submission rate — 95%+ at best-in-class versus 60–75% at bottom-quartile — is a better leading indicator of close health than days to close itself.
Low-risk start
See Neoflo work on your real documents, on your systems, before you commit to anything.