Overview
The Close the Books checklist is the pre-close readiness report built into Luminous. When you open the Close the Books wizard and select a period, the checklist runs a set of automated checks across your orders, inventory, AP, and integrations and tells you whether your books are ready to close.
To walk through closing a period step by step, see How do I close a period using the Close the Books wizard?
Check severity levels
Every check is marked with one of two severity levels:
- Blocking — The report shows Not Ready to Close as long as any blocking check is failing and has not been acknowledged. You must either fix the issue or explicitly acknowledge it before you can accept the close.
- Warning — Recorded on the audit trail but does not prevent you from closing.
The checklist sections
1. Order Integrity (Blocking section)
| Check | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|
| No unposted orders | No sales or transfer orders dated in the period are still waiting in Purgatory |
| No unmapped items | Every order line item in the period has been mapped to a product |
| No zero-cost sales items | Every shipped, inventory-tracked line has a cost recorded — a $0 cost inflates gross profit and understates COGS |
| No sales items mapped to deleted products | No shipped line items still point at a product that has since been deleted |
| No negative quantity cancellations | No order items carry a negative cancellation quantity |
2. Inventory Integrity (Blocking section)
| Check | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|
| No negative on-hand inventory | No inventory SKU has a quantity below zero |
| No SKUs missing landed cost | Every in-stock SKU has a cost value (estimated landed cost or open cost-layer value, depending on your account's settings) |
| No zero-valuation inventory | No in-stock inventory product has zero open cost-layer value |
| Shipped orders have inventory qty logs | Every shipped order that was supposed to affect on-hand inventory has the matching quantity records |
Non-inventory, fee, and kit SKUs are excluded from the inventory checks.
3. Location & Bin Integrity (Warning section)
This section appears only when bin/location tracking is enabled for your account. It checks at the bin level — issues here can mean stock is unpickable even when the warehouse header looks correct.
| Check | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|
| On-hand stock is housed in a live bin | No stock exists only in a deleted or deactivated bin |
| Bin quantities sum to the warehouse total | The sum of all bin rows matches the warehouse header quantity |
| Bin rows sit under their own warehouse | No bin is filed under the wrong warehouse |
| Deleted SKUs leave no bin rows behind | Deleted products have no leftover empty bin records |
| No stock stranded in packing WIP bins | Packed picklists have returned their staging-bin stock to pick bins |
| Quantity ledger agrees with the bins that exist | No location shows a balance in the quantity ledger without a matching bin row |
4. Accounts Payable (Blocking and Warning)
| Check | Severity | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|---|
| No unposted bills | Blocking | All non-draft, non-cancelled bills dated in the period have been posted to accounting |
| No open bill variances | Blocking | No bills have a detected variance awaiting resolution |
| No uninvoiced receipts (GR/IR) | Blocking | Every goods receipt in the period has a matching vendor bill |
| All posted bills reconciled | Warning | Posted bills have their line items fully allocated to receipts |
| No bills on hold | Warning | No bills are currently held from payment processing |
| No unapplied vendor credits | Warning | All open vendor credits have been applied to bills |
| No unapplied prepayments | Warning | All prepayments have been applied to bills |
| No bill QuickBooks sync errors | Warning | All bills in the period synced successfully to QuickBooks |
5. Sync & Integration Health (Warning section)
| Check | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|
| All channels syncing | Every enabled order-sync channel has successfully synced within the last 48 hours |
| No invoice sync errors | No QuickBooks invoice sync errors occurred in the period |
| No failed webhooks | No webhook deliveries failed during the period |
| Cost layers synced | The nightly cost-layer rebuild has run within the last 36 hours (shown when enabled for your account) |
6. Invoice & Shipment Integrity (Warning section)
These checks look for mismatches between shipment records and invoices across the period:
- Shipped uninvoiced — shipments with no invoice
- Shipped under-invoiced — invoices for fewer units than were shipped
- Shipped over-invoiced — invoices for more units than were shipped
- Over-shipped items — order items shipped beyond their ordered quantity
- Shipment-invoice month integrity — shipments and their invoices fall in different calendar months
- Stale partially shipped orders — older orders still only partially shipped
- Unfulfilled aging orders — orders that have aged without being fulfilled
7. EDI (Warning section)
| Check | What Luminous verifies |
|---|---|
| EDI 856 shipments complete | All shipments in the period that require an Advance Ship Notice (EDI 856) have one |
The "Ready to Close" status
The summary banner shows Ready to Close when every Blocking check either passes or has been marked as Reviewed, Not applicable, or Resolved. Warning checks are recorded but do not affect readiness.
Filtering and interacting with the checklist
- Blockers only toggle — Hides passing and warning checks so you can focus on what needs attention.
- Expandable checks — Some checks (including Unposted Orders, Unmapped Items, and Shipped Uninvoiced) can be expanded to show a row-by-row breakdown for investigation without leaving the page.
- Mark as handled — If a check is not relevant to your workflow (for example, the EDI 856 check if you do not use EDI), you can mark it as Reviewed, Not applicable, or Resolved. Luminous stores an optional audit note and removes the check from the blocking count.
Checklist caching
Each section is cached for up to one hour after it first loads. If you resolve an issue and want to see the updated result immediately, use the Refresh control on that section to recompute it.