Month-end close is the routine a finance team follows after the last day of each month to bring its books up to date and lock them: checking that every transaction has been recorded, reconciling accounts, booking adjustments and producing management results. It is the most frequent form of the financial close, where the full process is explained.
A typical close includes bank and payment reconciliation, posting accruals and prepayments under accrual accounting, recording depreciation, and reviewing the general ledger for errors before running a trial balance. Many companies measure how many working days the close takes and try to shorten it, because managers cannot act on last month's numbers until they are final. The quarter-end and year-end closes add more work on top of the same routine.