QuickBooks month-end review: where it lives and what it flags
QuickBooks Online Accountant's month-end review flags incomplete transactions and unreconciled accounts, but only accountant users can open it.
The month-end review tool arrived in QuickBooks Online Accountant in 2020, and readers still ask where to find it in ordinary QuickBooks Online. The short answer: it is not there. Intuit built it as an accountant-only feature, exclusive to the portal accounting professionals use. A standard company subscription does not show it and never has. We walked through what the tool checks, how you open it, and who can actually use it.
Where the tool lives
Month-end review exists only in QuickBooks Online Accountant, the firm-facing side of the product. Intuit introduced it with a pitch aimed at firms that close client books every month: a repeatable workflow, consistent quality across bookkeepers, and less time spent chasing loose ends before a close.
If you sign in as a company admin on a standard subscription, no menu will surface the tool. That is by design, not a fault in your file. The review runs from an accountant’s seat, inside a client file opened through the accountant portal, and the vendor has kept that boundary in place since launch.
How do you open it?
The path matters, because nothing in the standard interface points the way. Sign in to QuickBooks Online Accountant and open the Clients list. Select the client whose books you want to close, open their books, and launch month-end review from the accountant toolbox inside the file. The review opens with its own tabs, and you work through them in order. Progress is saved as you go. The client’s monthly status then appears back on the client list, so a firm can see at a glance which months are closed and which are not.
What does each tab flag?
The review is organized into three tabs, and each targets a different kind of problem.
Transaction review scans for incomplete entries. Expect it to surface uncategorized income and expenses, unapplied customer payments, unidentified deposits, and journal entries nobody has reviewed. Each flagged item is clickable, so you can fix it in place or mark it as already checked.
Account reconciliation shows the state of the accounts for the period. It flags accounts that have not been reconciled yet, along with any account where the book balance does not line up with the statement. This is the tab that catches the classic close-time problem: a register that looks right but was never tied to the bank.
Final review is the closing checklist. It comes with recommended tasks, and you can reshape the list for each client, since a retail business needs different checks than a professional practice. You work down the list, tick items off, and mark the month complete.
Tracking progress across a firm
Two design choices matter for teams. The checklists are customizable per client, so a firm can encode its own closing process once and reuse it across the practice. Progress is also tracked at two levels: by client, visible on the client list, and by bookkeeper, so a manager can see who is behind without looking over shoulders. That dual tracking was a headline selling point at launch, and it remains the clearest reason a firm would adopt the workflow.
Can a business owner use it?
Not directly. The tool requires access through QuickBooks Online Accountant, the accounting professional’s side of the product. If an outside firm handles your books, the review happens on their side, and the results reach you as cleaner numbers. If you keep your own books on a standard subscription, the feature is out of reach. The equivalent work falls to you by hand: sort uncategorized transactions, reconcile every bank and card account, then run your own closing checklist before calling the month closed.
The short version
The confusion around this tool has a simple root: an accountant-only feature, inside an accountant-only portal, promoted mainly to accounting firms. Once you know that, the missing menu entry stops looking like a glitch. The feature itself does real work. It flags incomplete transactions and unreconciled accounts, walks you through a checklist you control, and reports progress back to the firm’s client list. For anyone closing books through the accountant portal, it is the intended home for that work. For everyone else, it stays invisible, and that is intended behavior rather than an error.