The Month-End Close Checklist for Commercial Properties

A commercial month-end close confirms that every charge, receipt, and expense for the month is in the books, then locks the period so the reported numbers stay fixed. What makes it commercial is one extra step: checking actual operating costs against the estimates tenants are paying.

Use this checklist as a starting point and adapt it to your portfolio. The order matters: each step depends on the one before it.

1. Billing (day 1)

• Confirm rent and recovery estimates were billed for every active lease
• Check for escalations that took effect this month and verify the new amount was billed
• Bill any one-time charges: reconciliation balances, percentage rent, utility reimbursements
• Review leases that started or ended this month for proration

Escalations are the most common miss. A step that should have started on the 1st and was not billed is easy to catch now and awkward to catch in six months.

2. Receipts (days 1 to 3)

• Apply every payment to specific charges, never only to the tenant balance
• Chase unidentified receipts until they are matched
• Record returned payments and reverse the applications
• Record security deposit activity in its own liability account

Apply payments to the charges the tenant intended. When a tenant short-pays to dispute a CAM true-up, applying the payment oldest-first can make the dispute look like unpaid base rent and trigger the wrong default notice.

3. Expenses and accruals (days 2 to 4)

• Enter all vendor invoices for the month
• Accrue expenses incurred but not yet invoiced: utilities, janitorial, snow removal
• Code each expense to the account that maps to its recovery pool
• Flag capital items so they stay out of recoverable expenses

Coding is where the year-end reconciliation is won or lost. An HVAC replacement coded to repairs will flow into CAM and become an audit finding. See standard CAM exclusions.

4. Bank reconciliation (day 3)

• Reconcile each operating and security deposit account to the statement
• Investigate every reconciling item older than one month

5. Recovery tracking (day 4)

• Compare year-to-date operating expenses to budget, by recovery pool
• Compare year-to-date estimates billed to the budget they were set from
• If any pool is running more than about 10% off budget, consider revising estimates

This step is what separates commercial from residential closes. A property where CAM is tracking 15% over budget in June will produce a large true-up next spring unless estimates change now. CAM estimates and true-ups covers when and how to revise them.

6. AR review (day 4)

• Review the receivables aging by tenant and by charge type
• Note disputed charges separately from unpaid ones
• Decide on reminders, payment plans, or default notices
• Record any write-offs as explicit entries, with approval

7. Lease events (day 5)

• Upcoming expirations, renewal option windows, and critical dates in the next 90 days
• Amendments signed this month, with billing changes confirmed
• Certificates of insurance expiring

8. Reports and lock (day 5)

• Run the income statement, balance sheet, AR aging, and rent roll for each property
• Review for anything unusual against last month and budget
• Lock the period

After the lock, corrections post to the open month as reversals and new entries. That way the report sent to an owner in May can be reproduced exactly in November.

Make it repeatable

The checklist is only useful if the same steps run every month, in the same order, by whoever is closing. Write it down, assign each step, and record when it was done. The commercial property accounting guide covers the chart of accounts and reports this close depends on, and commercial property accounting software builds period close into the ledger itself.