A Monthly Close Checklist for Portuguese Accountants

It's the 14th of the month. You meant to have three clients fully closed by now. Instead, two are still missing invoices, one has a VAT reconciliation that won't balance, and you haven't looked at the IRS retentions at all. The SAF-T deadline is six days away and the Segurança Social deadline is five.

If this is a normal month for you, the problem isn't that you're behind. The problem is that there's no agreed calendar for what gets done when — so every obligation feels like a surprise.

The monthly close for a Portuguese accounting practice has roughly twenty distinct tasks spread across three weeks. They don't all need to happen at the end. Most of them work better if they don't — and the SAF-T Portugal guide covers the submission mechanics that anchor the whole timeline.

Here's the full checklist, keyed to the days it actually belongs on.

What "monthly close" actually means here

For a contabilista certificado in Portugal, a full monthly close for an SME client covers, at minimum:

• Collection of all purchase invoices (faturas de fornecedores) for the prior month
• Reconciliation of sales invoices from the client's billing software
• Bank reconciliation
• Payroll processing and Segurança Social declarations
• IRS retentions (guia de retenções na fonte)
• IVA periódica (monthly or quarterly depending on the regime)
• SAF-T de faturação submission
• Bookkeeping entries, depreciations, accruals
• Handoff report or management snapshot for the client

Each has its own deadline. The legal ones don't move. Treating the whole thing as "close the month by the 20th" is what creates the crunch — because the crunch is actually four or five stacked deadlines hitting in the same week.

The checklist below maps every task to a concrete day window. Adapt the specific dates to your practice, but keep the ordering.

Days 1–3: Set the month up so it closes itself

1. Confirm which clients close this month and in what regime

Before you touch any invoice, re-check the basics for each client:

• IVA regime (monthly vs quarterly) — a client who moved from the regime trimestral to mensal does not tell you unprompted
• Payroll count (did someone leave, did someone get hired)
• Any new CAE, new branch, new activity that changes the chart of accounts
• New recurring suppliers that should be in your mental checklist

Five minutes per client. It prevents the 90-minute surprise on day 15.

2. Send the monthly checklist message to every client

Not "send me your invoices." A structured checklist listing their recurring suppliers, so they flag what's missing rather than you guessing:

• EDP / Galp (electricity, gas)
• Vodafone / NOS / MEO (telecoms)
• Rent (senhorio)
• Segurança social
• Seguros
• Any client-specific recurring items

Most clients respond to a checklist. They don't respond to open-ended "send me everything."

3. Open the status dashboard

A simple sheet with one row per client and columns for: invoices received, invoices expected, bank reconciled, payroll done, SAF-T generated, SAF-T submitted, IVA submitted, retentions submitted, SS submitted. If you already have this, update it. If you don't, build it. Managing more than four clients by memory is how mistakes happen.

Days 4–10: Intake and continuous processing

4. Collect and process invoices as they arrive

If you have a shared folder workflow with clients (the accountant-client handoff problem), invoices should be trickling in from day 1. Your job on days 4–10 is to process them continuously — not stockpile them for a week-15 marathon.

Extract the data, validate the NIF, book the entry, move the file from Entregue/ to Processado/. Anything ambiguous goes into Dúvidas/ with a comment.

5. Check e-fatura for what the client forgot

On day 8, pull each client's e-fatura list from the Portal das Finanças. Compare against what you actually have in the shared folder. The gap is usually:

• Supplier portal downloads the client didn't fetch (EDP, Vodafone, MEO all do this)
• Paper receipts the client hasn't scanned
• Old invoices communicated to AT late

Ask for them specifically. "Faltam estas três faturas do portal da Vodafone" gets results. "Faltam faturas" does not. For a full workflow covering how to triage each type of mismatch and batch your client questions, see reconciling e-fatura data with client books.

6. Run the first bank reconciliation pass

Not the final one. A preliminary pass to see what's moving. Payments without an invoice on file, invoices paid twice, transfers that don't match amounts — all easier to resolve on day 9 than day 18.

7. Process salary changes and payroll inputs

Any changes to headcount, hours, bonuses, termination indemnities, or subsídios should be captured by day 10. Payroll has two legal deadlines pressing on it later in the month; you do not want to be reconfirming a subsídio de alimentação rate on the 18th.

Days 10–15: The legal deadlines start hitting

8. Submit IRS retentions on the source (Modelo 10 / guia)

Retenções na fonte are due by the 20th of the following month. Prepare and submit the guia de retenções on day 10–12. This covers IRS on salaries, on self-employed service providers (recibos verdes retidos), on rents from Category F income you're managing, and on any other applicable withholdings.

Check that you have the correct rates. For freelancers providing services, the standard IRS retention is 25% (or 11.5% for certain low-income regimes) — don't apply the wrong rate just because it's what you used last month.

9. Submit Segurança Social contributions

SS contributions for the prior month are due by the 20th via Segurança Social Direta. Generate the DMR (Declaração Mensal de Remunerações), cross-check it against the payroll run from day 7, and submit.

The common mistake: generating the DMR from payroll software that wasn't updated with a mid-month change — a termination, a new hire, a salary adjustment. The DMR is what SS will audit against later. Get it right now.

10. Close sales invoicing with the client's billing software

For every client that issues invoices through a certified billing software (Moloni, Primavera, InvoiceXpress, Toconline, etc.), pull the monthly SAF-T de faturação from their system. Check:

• Sequence integrity — no gaps in the invoice numbering
• Credit notes applied correctly
• IVA rates consistent with the product/service classification
• All invoices within the correct month (no December invoices leaking into January)

This is the file you'll need for step 14. Do it now while it's clean, not on day 19 under pressure.

Days 15–18: Reconcile and validate

11. Final bank reconciliation

Every account, every client. This is the point where any unrecorded expense shows up — direct debits that weren't invoiced, bank fees, interest, reversals. Book them.

The bank reconciliation is also the honesty check for whether your invoice intake was complete. If €2,340 left the bank with no matching invoice on file, something is missing.

12. Book depreciations, accruals, and month-end adjustments

The stuff that isn't invoice-driven: amortizações, specializações, accruals for known expenses not yet invoiced, provisions. These are the entries that get skipped when you're in a hurry and show up as year-end nightmares.

Ten minutes per client, done now.

13. Run a mid-close IVA sanity check

Before you commit to the final SAF-T and IVA periódica, run a reconciliation between:

• IVA dedutível from your purchase invoices
• IVA liquidado from your sales invoices
• The SAF-T files (faturação and contabilidade if applicable)
• What the client's balance sheet says about IVA a pagar / a recuperar

If the numbers don't match, fix it now. A mismatch in the IVA periódica that you submit on day 19 will still be a mismatch — just one that's now visible to AT.

Days 18–20: The submission window

14. Generate and submit SAF-T

SAF-T de faturação for invoices issued is due by the 5th of the month after the issuing period, but most practices now submit monthly, on a tight schedule. If you've followed the automated SAF-T workflow, this step is a validation-and-submit, not a file-building exercise.

Validate first. NIF mismatches, duplicate invoice numbers, sequence gaps — all better caught here than after AT cross-references.

15. Submit IVA periódica

For clients on the monthly regime, IVA is due by the 20th. For quarterly, by the 20th of the second month after the quarter ends. Submit via the Portal das Finanças. Match the value paid or refunded against the journal entry you booked in step 13 — if they disagree, something is wrong with one of them.

16. Confirm SS and IRS submissions from days 8–9 went through

Don't assume. Log in, confirm the guia was accepted, confirm the SS submission is in entregue status. Five minutes. Prevents a call in February about a January filing that silently failed.

Days 20–25: Close and hand off

17. Close the accounting period in the software

Lock the month. Some accounting systems support this formally; others require a convention. Either way, the month should be un-editable from this point unless there's a formal reopening. Otherwise you'll discover on day 40 that a junior added three entries to "last month" to balance something.

18. Produce the client snapshot

One page per client: revenue, expenses, IVA position, cash position, any flags. This is what differentiates an accountant the client sees as a strategic partner from one they see as a submission service. It doesn't need to be fancy — a clean summary in an email is enough.

19. Flag issues for next month before you forget

If a client had three NIF mismatches this month, note it. If a supplier's invoice numbering had gaps two months running, note it. If a client keeps forgetting the Vodafone portal, note it.

Keep a running issues log per client. At the start of the next month (day 1 of step 1), you'll read this list and know where to push.

20. Update the practice-level calendar

Did any deadline get tight this month? Was there an obligation you discovered late? Anything that surprised you goes into the practice calendar now, so next month it doesn't surprise anyone.

What to do differently

The accountants who rarely feel month-end pressure aren't the ones with the most hours. They're the ones whose close is spread across three weeks instead of three days. Invoices are processed continuously. Validation happens mid-month. Legal submissions are submitted early when the data is ready. The 20th is a check-in day, not a crisis.

You don't get there by working harder on the 18th. You get there by making day 3 and day 8 productive so day 18 is boring.

Start with one client. Run this checklist for their next close. If the 18th feels quieter, expand it to the rest.

If you want the mechanical parts — invoice extraction, NIF validation, SAF-T generation, status tracking — handled so you can focus on the steps that actually need judgment, see what we've built for accountants.