SLA validation + dependency-order enforcement + owner audit trail — period close checklist automation in under 20 seconds per upload.
| Task ID | Task Name | Owner | Dept | Due | Plan Fin | Act Fin | SLA (h) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-014 | Post depreciation run (fixed assets) | Acme Applicant | Fixed Assets | WD+3 | 2026-04-03 | 2026-04-03 | 24 | Done |
| T-021 | Inter-company elimination booking | Acme Applicant | Consolidation | WD+4 | 2026-04-04 | 2026-04-06 | 24 | Breached |
| T-033 | Schedule III financial statement mapping | Acme Applicant | Reporting | WD+6 | 2026-04-06 | — | 24 | At Risk |
For most mid-market finance teams, the monthly period close checklist is coordinated through a shared spreadsheet or a chain of email threads — a process with no real-time visibility into which tasks are on time, which have breached their SLA, and which are sequentially blocked because a predecessor has not yet closed.
A controller managing 35–60 close tasks across General Ledger, Fixed Assets, Consolidation, Treasury, and Reporting departments has no automated view of whether each task is on track or breached. Assembling that picture manually takes 2–3 hours every day of the close window — time consumed by status calls and spreadsheet updates rather than exception resolution.
Indian companies under Schedule III of the Companies Act 2013 must complete tasks in a defined order before financial statements can be signed off. Posting the depreciation run (T-014) before fixed asset additions are locked, or starting Board pack consolidation (T-035) before T-031 closes, can corrupt downstream balances and require a re-run of multiple ledger entries — delaying board pack delivery by one to two days.
Ind AS 109 requires expected credit loss provisioning at every reporting date. When the task booking that provision (T-027) carries a blank owner field — a common occurrence in manually maintained spreadsheets — the provision may be omitted from the period's financials entirely. Under ICAI SA 315, an auditor who finds tasks without named owners must treat the close process as a control deficiency, which increases audit risk and can result in additional procedures.
A task in In Progress status with no actual_finish date past its close cutoff — such as T-033 (Schedule III financial statement mapping, WD+6) — means financial statements cannot be finalised on schedule. In a spreadsheet-based tracker this class of error is invisible until someone manually scans every row. The damage — a delayed close, a restated board pack, an auditor escalation — is already done by the time the check is run.
The daily cost of status-assembly for a controller managing a 40–60-task close cycle across five or more departments. Under ICAI SA 315 (Identifying and Assessing the Risks of Material Misstatement), if the close checklist cannot demonstrate that every task had a named owner, SLAs were tracked, and dependency order was enforced, the auditor must treat the close process as a control deficiency — with direct consequences for the statutory audit opinion.
The period-close process is governed by a combination of statutory deadlines, accounting standards, and internal audit requirements. Four frameworks converge on the same checklist — each one creating a specific obligation that a spreadsheet tracker cannot reliably enforce.
Under Section 129, the Board must approve financial statements within 60 days of the financial year end for listed entities. Schedule III prescribes the exact presentation format, which means tasks like Schedule III mapping, intercompany elimination, and disclosure note preparation must complete in sequence before the statements can be signed off. Any out-of-order completion risks a misstatement in the filed financials.
Ind AS 109 Para 5.5 requires an entity to measure expected credit losses at each reporting date using a forward-looking probability-of-default model. Ind AS 110 Para 19 requires intercompany balances and transactions to be eliminated before consolidated financials are prepared. Both tasks carry implicit close-sequence constraints — the ECL provision must be booked before the trial balance is locked, and intercompany eliminations must complete before consolidation begins.
ICAI SA 315 Para 12 requires external auditors to understand the entity's period-close process as part of understanding internal controls over financial reporting. If the checklist cannot demonstrate named owners, SLA tracking, and enforced dependency order, the auditor must treat this as a control deficiency. SA 265 then requires that deficiency to be communicated in writing to management and those charged with governance — a direct audit-opinion risk for companies without documented close controls.
For US-reporting entities, ASC 855 requires evaluation of events occurring after the balance sheet date through the financial statement issuance date — a task that belongs on the close checklist and must have a named owner and a confirmed completion date. COSO 2013 Control Activities Principle 10 requires that controls be implemented through policies and procedures, including documented evidence that the close process was monitored — exactly what a Cadel-validated checklist export provides.
Seven deterministic passes from checklist upload to close cockpit — in under 20 seconds per file. Each pass produces a structured output an auditor can verify line by line, and all seven steps execute identically for any task taxonomy: Ind AS, US GAAP, or a hybrid close cycle.
Accepts the close checklist as a structured Excel file (.xlsx) and parses every row into a typed extraction: task_id, task_name, owner, department, due_day (WD+), planned_start, planned_finish, actual_finish, status, dependency, and sla_hours. A minimum of one valid row is required; empty files are rejected immediately.
Every task row is checked for a non-null, non-blank owner field. Any row without a named owner receives a FAIL-severity Owner Required exception — satisfying the control requirement under ICAI SA 315 that every period-close task have an identified responsible individual. Unowned tasks are placed in an Unassigned bucket in the owner-wise rollup.
Computes the SLA due date as planned_finish + sla_hours for each task. Compares actual_finish against that deadline and records any excess as a breach with the exact delta in hours. Task T-021 (intercompany elimination booking, planned finish 2026-04-04, actual finish 2026-04-06) is flagged with a breach delta of +48 hours against its 24-hour SLA.
For each task with a non-null dependency field, looks up the predecessor's actual_finish date and compares it against the successor's planned_start. If the predecessor's actual finish is later than the successor's planned start, a Dependency Order FAIL is raised citing the predecessor task ID. If the predecessor task ID is absent from the uploaded checklist, a separate Missing Predecessor exception prevents a silent pass-through.
Scans for tasks with status = 'In Progress' and no actual_finish date where the current date has passed planned_finish. These are classified as stuck past close cutoff and receive an At Risk badge. Task T-033 (Schedule III mapping, WD+6, no actual finish recorded) surfaces as stuck in the escalation view with the owning individual identified for follow-up.
Every task receives exactly one of four status badges based on the combined result of all validation passes: On Track (SLA compliant, dependencies met, not past cutoff), At Risk (stuck in progress past cutoff), Breached (SLA exceeded or dependency violated), or Done (actual finish recorded, all checks pass). Badge assignment is deterministic — identical inputs always produce identical outputs.
Produces three artefacts in a single output: a close cockpit inbox sorted by exception severity (FAIL → WARNING → PASS), an owner-wise rollup table showing each person's task count broken down by badge, and an Excel export of the full checklist with a breach_reason column appended to every exception row — formatted for direct inclusion in the audit file under ICAI SA 265.
A battery of synthetic test scenarios that exercise every failure mode seen in real-world close data. Each scenario produces a deterministic outcome a controller or auditor can verify in seconds — identical inputs always yield identical badge assignments and exception counts.
actual_finish recorded, past its due day of WD+6 (planned finish 2026-04-06).dependency column, but T-019 is entirely absent from the uploaded checklist — a data-completeness gap that would cause a silent pass-through in a spreadsheet.Five seeded checklist files — each engineered to exercise a distinct exception class. Four contain at least one failing task; one is fully clean, establishing the baseline pass case for audit walkthrough.
Demonstrates a fully compliant close task: all fields populated, SLA met within 24 hours, predecessor T-008 confirmed closed before T-014 starts. This is the baseline control evidence document for audit walkthroughs.
Shows T-021 completing 48 hours past its planned finish of 2026-04-04, triggering a FAIL on the SLA Within Planned validation and a Breached badge in the close cockpit. Breach reason written to Excel export column.
Illustrates T-035 starting on 2026-04-04 before its dependency T-031 had confirmed closed. The board pack may contain figures based on an incomplete predecessor state — a class of error invisible in a manually maintained checklist.
Contains T-033 marked In Progress with no actual_finish date past WD+6. Financial statements cannot be finalised until this task closes. Owner surfaced in escalation view for immediate follow-up.
For a finance team managing 40–60 close tasks across five or more departments, manual status assembly takes 2–3 hours every day of the close window. Cadel's period close checklist automation replaces that with a single file upload that completes in under 20 seconds — delivering four enforcement rules that a spreadsheet cannot run at all: owner assignment, SLA compliance, stuck-task detection, and dependency sequencing.
Every checklist upload generates a timestamped extraction record with each task's raw field values and a full set of pass/fail validation outcomes. The Excel export satisfies the documentation requirements under ICAI SA 265 (communicating deficiencies in internal control) and supports walkthrough testing by external auditors under ICAI SA 315 — without requiring the controller to maintain a separate audit evidence file.
The dependency-order check catches the most operationally damaging close error: a task completed on time, on top of an open predecessor. In T-035 (Board pack consolidation), this class of error is invisible in a manually maintained checklist but produces a board pack potentially based on incomplete consolidation figures. Catching it before the pack is distributed prevents a restatement.
The checklist schema is taxonomy-agnostic: Ind AS tasks (ECL provisioning under Ind AS 109, Schedule III mapping under Companies Act 2013) and US GAAP tasks (subsequent event evaluation under ASC 855, lease recomputation under ASC 842) can co-exist in a single upload. Department and optional entity columns allow a group controller to filter exceptions by legal entity without maintaining separate checklists per subsidiary.
The questions finance controllers and internal auditors ask most often before deploying period-close checklist automation.
Indian mid-market close tasks are driven by multiple frameworks simultaneously: depreciation posting follows the Companies Act 2013 Schedule II useful-life tables; expected credit loss provisioning follows Ind AS 109 (financial instruments); intercompany eliminations and consolidation follow Ind AS 110; and financial statement mapping follows the Schedule III format prescribed under the Companies Act 2013. For US entities, analogous tasks map to ASC 350 (intangibles), ASC 842 (leases), and ASC 606 (revenue). Cadel applies SLA and dependency logic to any task taxonomy regardless of the regulatory basis of the underlying task.
Each checklist row carries a due_day (working day offset from the last calendar day of the period, e.g., WD+4) and an sla_hours field (e.g., 24 hours). The SLA due date is computed as planned_finish plus sla_hours. A breach is recorded when actual_finish exceeds this computed deadline, or when a task remains in 'In Progress' status after the close cutoff date. The breach reason written to the Excel export includes the exact delta in hours, so auditors can assess materiality without re-computing dates manually.
For each task with a non-null dependency field (e.g., T-035 depends on T-031), Cadel looks up the predecessor's actual_finish date and compares it against the successor's planned_start. If the predecessor's actual finish is later than the successor's planned start, the check fails with a Dependency Order violation. If the predecessor task ID is absent from the uploaded checklist entirely, a separate Missing Predecessor exception is raised with FAIL severity, preventing a silent pass-through on incomplete data.
The current workflow ingests a structured Excel file (.xlsx) with one row per close task; this file can be exported from any ERP's project-tracking or workflow module — including Tally's period-end report, SAP's Financial Closing Cockpit (transaction FINS_CLOCL), or NetSuite's Period Close Checklist. Cadel does not require a live API connection to any ERP, which means the audit trail is tied to the uploaded file version and its timestamp, not to a live system state that could change post-review.
Every checklist upload generates a timestamped extraction record containing the period_label (e.g., 'Apr FY26'), each task's raw field values, and the full set of validation results with pass/fail/not-performed outcomes and machine-readable comments. The Excel export includes a Breach Reasons column appended to the original checklist, which satisfies documentation requirements under ICAI SA 265 (communicating deficiencies in internal control) and supports walkthrough testing by internal audit under ICAI SA 315. External auditors can reference the timestamped export as evidence that period-close controls were monitored and exceptions were actioned.
Yes. The checklist schema includes a department column (e.g., Fixed Assets, Consolidation, Treasury, FP&A, Reporting), and the close cockpit groups tasks by department as well as by individual owner. For multi-entity groups, the recommended practice is to include an optional entity column in the uploaded file; Cadel's extraction layer passes this field through to the owner-wise rollup and the breach export, allowing a group controller to filter exceptions by legal entity without maintaining separate checklists per subsidiary.
The dependency check runs regardless of the successor's status field. If a task is marked Done but its predecessor's actual_finish is later than the successor's planned_start, a Dependency Order FAIL is still raised — because the figures in any output produced from that task (e.g., the board pack, the consolidation journal) may have been based on an incomplete predecessor state. The T-035 (Board pack consolidation) scenario in the sample data demonstrates exactly this class of error: marked Done on 2026-04-07, yet raised as Breached because T-031 had not verifiably closed before T-035 started.
Yes. The checklist schema is taxonomy-agnostic: you can include both Ind AS tasks (ECL provisioning under Ind AS 109, Schedule III mapping) and US GAAP tasks (ASC 842 lease recomputation, ASC 606 revenue cut-off entries, ASC 855 subsequent-event evaluation) in a single upload. Cadel applies the same four validation rules — owner, SLA, stuck-task, dependency — to every row regardless of the accounting standard driving the underlying task. Department and entity columns allow the close cockpit to filter by GAAP stream for multi-standard reporting entities.