Period Close Status

Current open accounting period and whether the close is on track, in progress, or overdue against the close calendar.

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At a glance

The live status of the current accounting close: which period is open, how far through the close checklist it is, and whether it is on track, in progress, or overdue against the target close date. This is the executive at-a-glance answer to “are we closed yet, and if not, are we on schedule.” Sage Intacct tracks each reporting period’s open/closed state and the close action timestamp; the card reads the open period against the workspace close calendar and the gating tasks (reconciliations, sub-ledger close, eliminations) to render a single status the owner and CFO can read in two seconds.

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Calculation

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Worked example

1. The status is Overdue and the card immediately tells you why, which is the whole point of a hero close card. The May 26 close is at BD7 against a BD6 target, so it has slipped by one business day. A plain “overdue” flag would prompt a round of “what’s holding it up” emails. This card already shows the two blocking gates: the EUR bank reconciliation and the intercompany eliminations. The CFO does not need to chase; the card has named the bottleneck and the owner. The fix is to get Treasury onto the EUR bank rec and group finance onto the eliminations, in that order, because VAT provisioning is itself waiting on the eliminations.
2. The blocking chain matters more than the count of open tasks. Three tasks are outstanding, but only two are actually blocking, and one of those (eliminations) is blocking a third (VAT provisioning). So the critical path is eliminations, not the longer list. Reading the dependency is what turns a status card from a scoreboard into an action tool. On this account the Controller reordered the day’s work around clearing eliminations first, which unblocked VAT and let the close finish at BD8 rather than drifting to BD10.
3. A one-day slip is not yet an alarm, and the card’s threshold reflects that. The default overdue alert fires at 5 days past target, not at the first day. This is deliberate: a close that runs a day or two long for an explainable reason (a late carrier invoice, a bank feed delay) is normal operational variance, not a crisis. The card shows the status honestly (Overdue at BD7) but does not escalate to an alert until the slip is material. A business that wants a tighter signal can lower the threshold; a business with a lumpy close can raise it.
4. This card is the live companion to the trailing close-rate metric. Where Period Close On-Time Rate (12mo) tells you how reliably you have closed on time over a year, this card tells you whether this close is about to add another miss to that record. Read together they let the CFO answer the board’s two questions at once: “are we usually on time” and “are we on time right now.” On this account the trailing rate was strong, so the one-day slip read as ordinary variance rather than a deteriorating trend, which is the reassuring interpretation and the correct one.
5. The gating-task view connects the close to its upstream causes across other cards. The outstanding EUR bank reconciliation links straight to Days Since Last Bank Reconciliation; the outstanding eliminations link to Sage Intercompany Balance; the pending VAT provisioning links to Current VAT Return Status (MTD). The status card is the hub; the gating cards are the spokes. A finance team that wires these together can move from “the close is late” to “the close is late because the EUR bank feed lagged two days and eliminations are queued behind it” without a single status meeting.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against Sage

General Ledger → Setup → Manage Reporting Periods for the open/closed state of the current period per book and entity General Ledger → All → Close Checklist (where configured) for the gating tasks and their completion state Cash Management → Reconciliation for the live bank reconciliation status that gates the close Consolidation → Eliminations for the intercompany elimination state that gates the consolidated close Reports → General Ledger → Trial Balance as-of the open period to confirm it balances before the close action Interactive Custom Report (ICR) on period state and elapsed-days-since-period-end against the configured target close date

• Soft close shows “closed” internally but the GL is open: a team that has soft-closed the sub-ledgers may consider the period done while Intacct still shows the GL open for adjustments. The card distinguishes the two; align the field map to whichever your team treats as “closed.”
• Reopened periods read as open again: a period reopened to post a late correction flips back to open and the card reflects that. If your governance treats the original close as final, expect a brief disagreement until the reopen is re-closed.
• Per-book divergence: the tax book may still be open while the primary book is closed. The card reports the primary book by default; a tax-book reader sees a different status.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre