Year-end close in Uku — a practical checklist

The end of the calendar year is the best time to tidy up your Uku account — not because it is required, but because starting a clean year is so much easier than carrying unresolved items into January. This checklist walks through each area in the order that makes most sense: billing first, then time, then workflows, then setup for next year.

Most firms can complete this in two focused sessions of an hour each. The first week of December is a good time, before the rush of year-end client work begins.

Quick answer

Year-end close covers: (1) final invoicing and missed billing sweep, (2) time reconciliation and flextime review, (3) task cleanup on dashboards, (4) Monitoring review, (5) template updates for next year, and (6) team preparation. None of these are mandatory, but all are useful.

Who does this

• Company Admins and Company Owners handle billing, flextime approvals, and template updates.
• All team members should complete their time entries and clear their dashboards.

1. Final billing sweep

1a — Run Missed Billing for the full year

Open Missed Billing (yourcompany.uku.app/missed-billing) and set the date range to This year. This gives you a full view of any billable work across the whole year that was never invoiced.

Decide for each item: is this genuinely recoverable? Items from early in the year may not be worth billing retroactively (client relationships, context loss), but items from October onwards usually are. Reclaim those that are worth billing into December’s billing period. See How to find and manage missed billing.

1b — Send final invoices

Ensure all December invoices are created, sent, and marked with their correct status before year-end. Pay particular attention to:

• Clients on annual contracts — has their renewal invoice gone out?
• Clients with outstanding prepayment invoices — have they been applied?
• Any extra-work invoices from the year that were drafted but never sent?

Use the invoice list view in Billing to filter by Status = Draft and review all drafts before the year closes. See Invoice lifecycle and bulk actions.

1c — Check for outstanding payments

Filter the invoice list by Status = Sent to see all invoices that have been sent but not yet marked as paid. Follow up on any that are significantly overdue before year-end, and update statuses on any that have been paid but not recorded in Uku.

2. Time reconciliation

2a — Prompt the team to complete their time entries

A few days before the year closes, remind every team member to review their open tasks and ensure all time entries are logged. Unlogged time cannot be invoiced and does not appear in reports. A simple message with a deadline (for example, “all December time entries logged by December 27”) works well.

2b — Review the time report for the year

Go to Report > Time tab and filter by date range: the full year. Look for any team members with unusual patterns — very low tracked time relative to their contract hours, or large gaps in specific months. These may indicate under-tracking or issues with time-topic assignment. See Reports — Time tab.

2c — Approve and close Flextime periods

If your firm uses the Flextime app, all periods for the year need to be approved before the flextime balance is finalized for each team member. Go to Report > Flextime tab and review any periods with Pending status.

• Approve periods where time is correct.
• Flag periods where time entries look wrong before approving — it is easier to correct them now than after year-end.
• Once all periods are approved, the year-end flextime balance for each member is final.

If any team members have significant positive or negative balances, now is the time to agree on how those will be handled — carried over, paid out, or reset. See Flextime balance and history and Reports — Flextime tab.

3. Task and dashboard cleanup

3a — Clear overdue and orphaned tasks

Ask each team member to review their dashboard for tasks that:

• Are past due but genuinely completed — mark them done.
• Are past due and no longer relevant — postpone or archive.
• Are incorrectly assigned or have no owner — reassign.

Company Admins can view any member’s dashboard using the Member filter. A quick pass over the team’s dashboards at year-end prevents a messy January start. See Uku Dashboard overview.

3b — Review annual recurring tasks

Check that annual recurring tasks for the new year are set up and will generate on the expected dates. Open a few clients and go to their Workflow tabs to verify that yearly tasks show upcoming instances correctly.

4. Monitoring year-in-review

Open Monitoring and review the full year data for your top clients. This is one of the most valuable exercises a Company Admin can do at year-end:

• Which clients consistently ran over their targets? These are your candidates for a fee increase or scope renegotiation next year.
• Which clients consistently ran under? Either the targets were set too high, or work was being done that was not tracked correctly.
• Are any monitoring targets badly out of date with the actual service scope?

Export the monitoring data to Excel for a permanent record of the year’s service delivery. Use this data as input for pricing conversations in Q1. See How to use Monitoring and Pricing conversations with data.

5. Prepare templates for next year

Year-end is the best time to improve your workflow templates based on what you learned this year.

1. Go to Settings & Apps > Tasks > Templates.
2. Review each template against what actually happened during the year. Were tasks added ad hoc that should be in the template? Were template tasks consistently skipped?
3. Make improvements and push them to existing clients using the bulk-update tool.
4. Set the Repeat tasks from date to January 1 of the new year when pushing updates — this ensures clients start the new year on the improved template without disrupting December work.

See Workflow templates for bookkeeping firms for the full template management approach, and How to update client tasks from template changes for the push process.

6. Team preparation for the new year

• Review team member roles and permissions. Has anyone’s responsibility changed during the year? Update their role or client access accordingly. See How to manage members and Roles and permissions.
• Archive members who have left the team. Deactivating preserves their historical data while removing their access and freeing the paid seat.
• Confirm that the new year’s Monitoring targets are set for all clients you plan to monitor. Targets carry forward automatically, but if the client’s scope changed, update the target now rather than in January.

A note on what you cannot automate

Uku handles the task generation, billing automation, and time tracking. The year-end review is still a human judgment exercise — looking at the data and deciding what it means. A client who ran 40% over their targets for the full year is a data point; the pricing conversation is the outcome. Build the habit of doing this review every year and it will pay for itself many times over.