Article written by Marketing Team
Closing as a catch-up exercise
In the fiduciary profession, the monthly accounting close has long looked like an investigation. The team opens the accounts, scrutinises each balance, looks for the misallocated entry, the balance that does not reconcile, the accrual someone forgot to book. It does so methodically, often with a proven checklist, but by hand, file by file, month after month.
This model is now reaching its limits, for three reasons.
The workload is growing. The more Swiss SMEs outsource their accounting, the more closings a single fiduciary team has to handle. The requirements, however, remain the same: proper bookkeeping under the Swiss Code of Obligations (art. 957 ff. CO) and periodic returns under the VAT Act (VATA).
An unresolved discrepancy travels badly. An entry left pending in April ends up in the annual closing in January. It has had nine months to feed into reconciliations, reporting and decisions. Dealing with it late costs more than spotting it straight away.
The expert’s time is worth more elsewhere. Manually looking for a depreciation run that did not go through is verification, not advice. Expertise counts most on decisions.
Thirteen deterministic controls, every month
A monthly closing control is an automated check that flags, at closing time, the exceptions that need to be justified.
Since the end of August 2026, thirteen controls run every month on the files we manage. They are deterministic controls, executed by scripts: each one applies a precise accounting rule to the data, without interpretation. Same rule, same data, same result. They cover the accounts where discrepancies most often hide:
- Suspense account
- Three clearing accounts (euro transfers, cards, bank)
- Automatic and manual bank reconciliation
- Prepaid expenses and accrued income, accrued expenses and deferred income
- Fixed asset register
- Open customer items and open supplier items
- Foreign currency revaluation
- Solvency check, in line with art. 725 CO
Each exception is passed to the accounting team with its context: the file, the entry, the control that triggered it and the reason it was flagged. It blocks nothing: it raises a question, and the expert decides.
Every month, these controls run across all files and surface the exceptions at closing time. An exception is not an error: it is an entry still open that calls for a justification, a reconciliation or a decision by the expert.
Without these scripts, we could never have gone this far in control and verification. Re-running thirteen controls on every file, every month, by hand, is more than a team can sustain without sacrificing the rest of its work.
Our approach: the more we automate, the more we control
At Synergix, a Geneva fiduciary, we have been building our own financial infrastructure since 2013. It supports our clients’ accounting, payroll, VAT and year-end closing, with a clear mission: give the expert better tools, not replace them.
Two principles guide this choice.
The first: deterministic methods for what must reconcile exactly, probabilistic methods for what requires understanding. The monthly controls are deterministic scripts, based on rules designed and tested by our finance department. An exception is always flagged for an identifiable reason.
The second: the more we automate execution, the more we automate control as well. Every process leaves a trace and goes through a check. In this set-up, AI is used to draft the summary of flagged items; the figures themselves are never entrusted to a probabilistic model. They go through an automated check, then to an expert who decides.
Human on the loop: our experts move up a level
Our set-up follows a human on the loop approach. The scripts run the controls continuously, our experts supervise the whole and step in where their judgement makes the difference. They no longer go through every account one by one: they handle the exceptions the system presents to them, with their context.
The manual monthly check was a repetitive and time-consuming task. Automating it does not make it disappear, it moves it: our teams spend less time searching and more time deciding. For each exception, the expert decides whether it is a correction to book, a deliberate special case or a document to obtain from the client.
Above all, our experts keep bringing their knowledge where it is irreplaceable: changes in business activity, tax choices, the advice to give the business owner. The time saved on detection is reinvested there. They move up a level, from searching to deciding, from verification to advice.
Automating control puts the fiduciary back where its signature is on the line.
Month-end becomes a time for verification
The close becomes a time for verification rather than reconstruction. The entries that come up are named, dated and put in context, and they no longer cause surprises at the annual closing.
For a Swiss SME that entrusts us with its accounting, this changes two things: reliable monthly figures sooner, and an annual closing that no longer reopens files already closed.
For our teams, it is a habit that is changing. Month-end is no longer the time to catch up, it is the time to verify.