Guide year-end book closing

A trader's CA used to arrive in March to close the year's books and discover, only then, that two bank accounts were never reconciled since August, a handful of customer invoices from October were never confirmed as paid or written off, and nobody had valued the closing stock at all that year. Every gap discovered that late became a scramble against a filing deadline that wasn't moving for anyone.

The year-end closing checklist covers exactly these common preparation steps — reconciling every bank account, confirming outstanding receivables and payables, valuing closing stock, gathering supporting documents — and tracks completion visible to both owner and CA throughout the year, not just in March. Once the CA marks the checklist reviewed, the period locks from further silent edits; any change after that point is a flagged, audited exception, not a quiet correction nobody would otherwise notice happened.

This capability is explicitly a process-management tool, and the language around what "closed" means here is deliberately precise. Marking a period "closed" in Khata is an internal bookkeeping-readiness state only — it means the standard preparation steps on the checklist have been completed and the CA has reviewed them fully. It is never presented as, and is never a substitute for, a CA's audit sign-off or statutory certification. A business owner reading "period locked" as "audit complete" would be making exactly the mistake this UI copy guards against, because the two things are simply not the same event.

The checklist itself covers the preparation steps that most commonly get missed when nobody's tracking them actively through the year as it progresses: reconciling every bank account, confirming outstanding receivables and payables are still accurate, valuing closing stock rather than leaving it blank, and gathering the supporting documents a CA will need. None of these steps are unusual or advanced — they're routine year-end hygiene that becomes a genuine scramble only when nobody's tracked progress until the deadline is close.

The lock mechanism's integrity depends entirely on one thing holding without exception, ever. A locked period edited through the exception flow must still hit the audit trail every time, with no carve-out. If a post-lock edit could somehow bypass that logging, the lock itself would become meaningless — a period that looks closed but was quietly altered afterward is arguably worse than one never locked at all, because it creates false confidence in a number that changed without anyone downstream knowing.