Tutorial 8 — Close the month

Time: about 20 minutes, once a month. A repeatable routine that turns a month of recordings into three decisions.

There is no "close the month" button. NairaFlow does not have a closing period, an opening balance, or a year-end lock — and it does not need one for a business this size. What it has is accurate records, and a short routine you run over them.

This tutorial is that routine. It is deliberately the same every month, so that by the third month it takes no thinking at all.

Why the routine exists

A month of records is just a list until you read it as a whole. The close is where the list becomes three answers:

1. Did the business make money?
2. What should I change?
3. Who owes me, and what am I owed?

Everything below is in service of those three answers.

The daily habit that makes the monthly one possible

This is the part that matters, and it takes thirty seconds.

Every evening, before you close the shop:

1. Record the day's sales.
2. Record any expenses you paid in cash.
3. That is all.

Your reminder time does this for you. Set it in Settings → Business profile (around 20:30 is a good default) and NairaFlow will nudge you every evening until you close the books.

A month cannot be closed accurately if it was not recorded accurately. An hour of catching up on the 30th is worth less than thirty seconds every evening, and it is a lot less painful. This is the single highest-value habit in the whole of NairaFlow.

The monthly routine

Step 1 — Read the month (5 minutes)

Reports → Period Summary. Set the first and last day of the month.

You get four numbers:

Now compare. Open Business Overview, pick Last month, and look at the two side by side.

Ask yourself three questions:

• Is money in up or down, and why? If down, look at the daily summary for the month and find the days that were quiet.
• Is money out up or down? Rising costs are usually the thing to act on.
• Is net cash flow positive? If it is negative, you know where to look before anything else.

A named period runs up to the moment you open the report, not to midnight. For exact figures use a custom date range with the first and last day of the month.

Step 2 — Find where the money went (5 minutes)

Reports → Cash Book, filtered to Expenses.

This is the part most people skip, and it is where the decisions are.

Then filter to Purchases and ask the same question about your stock. Between the two, you now know what your business really costs to run.

Set the filter to a custom period if you are reviewing a month that has ended — otherwise the cash book is showing you today as well.

Step 3 — Chase what is owed (5 minutes)

Debts. Open debts are the money that has been promised but not received.

Work down the list:

1. Biggest balance first — that is where the money is.
2. Oldest first — that is where the risk is.
3. For each one, open the contact and check their history. A customer who has always paid on time is different from one who has stalled before.

Then, if you buy on credit, check the payables side and settle what is due.

A debt is only as good as the contact behind it. If a credit sale was recorded with just a name and no contact record, you have no balance and no history to judge them by. Linking the contact is what makes this step work — do it at the time of the sale.

Step 4 — Restock (3 minutes)

Dashboard → Low stock alerts, or the Daily Summary for the month.

Every product on the list needs a decision:

A low-stock alert that is always on is an alert you will stop reading. Set the threshold to what actually matters to you, and the list becomes worth looking at.

Step 5 — Save the month (2 minutes)

Export the month's data to CSV — transactions, contacts, invoices, products and debts.

Two reasons:

• Your accountant can work in whatever they use.
• Your own record exists outside the app. If anything ever goes wrong with your account, your numbers are safe.

CSV export is on the Growth plan and above. Exports are capped at 10,000 rows, so export by month rather than all-time.

Step 6 — Write it down (2 minutes)

The close only produces value if it produces a decision. One page is enough:

MONTH END — [month name]

Money in            ₦___
Money out           ₦___
Net cash flow       ₦___
vs last month       up / down / same

Biggest expense     ____________
Biggest problem     ____________
Total owed to me    ₦___  (___ open debts)
Total I owe         ₦___  (___ supplier bills)

DECISIONS FOR NEXT MONTH
1. ______________________
2. ______________________
3. ______________________

One page per month, kept together. After a year you have a record of how the business actually grew, which is worth more than any single report.

Three things the close will show you that a single day never will

1. Your costs per sale. Filter the cash book to Purchases and Expenses over the month, and divide by the number of sales. That number — your real cost of doing business — is the most valuable thing in the app, and it is invisible in any single transaction.

2. Which sales channel actually pays. Your sales carry a channel: WhatsApp, Instagram, Walk-in, Airbnb, Booking.com. Look across a month. If Instagram is most of your sales and none of your Instagram leads convert, that is a marketing problem you can now see.

3. Whether your prices are right. Gross profit in the Daily Summary, compared across a month, tells you whether discounting is eating your margin or whether a specific product is priced below what it costs you.

Common questions at month end

One more habit worth having

Look at the cash book every week, not just every month. Five minutes on a Friday catches a mistake while it is still small — a sale recorded against the wrong product, an expense typed twice, a payment that never arrived.

A month of unattended recording is a month of compounding errors.

You have reached the end

That is the whole of NairaFlow, end to end:

Keep handy:

• Glossary → — every term, in plain English
• By business type → — the differences for retail, food, shortlet, freelancer and crypto businesses

If something did not go as expected