Monitoring across closed periods.
An optional monthly add-on for clients whose Managed Accounting is already running reliably. It reviews patterns across periods that a single month's close is not designed to reveal, and delivers a written summary. AnchorPoint calls this service Protect.
The monthly close looks at one period. This looks across several.
Reconciliation, balance sheet review, and investigation of unusual items are part of Managed Accounting and are never withheld from it. Monitoring is a separate piece of work: a comparison across closed periods, looking for direction and rate of change rather than whether one month is correct.
The output is a written summary of recurring issues and changes that deserve attention, prepared after the close.
Two conditions. Monitoring is offered once Managed Accounting is running reliably, because there is nothing meaningful to compare across periods in books that are still being corrected. It is priced as a monthly add-on to the recurring service.
If the monthly foundation is not in place yet, that is the conversation to have first.
The places books drift gradually rather than suddenly.
Each of these is a trend question rather than a single-month question, which is why it sits outside the base close.
- Reconciliation timeliness across periods, and unresolved items that keep reappearing
- Balance sheet accounts growing period over period without an explanation
- Working capital and cash pressure developing over several months
- Receivables aging past the point of being collectible
- Liability balances moving away from filings or lender statements
- Clearing and undeposited funds balances that are not clearing
- Recurring corrections that point to a workflow problem upstream
- Close discipline: whether periods are closing on schedule or slipping
Argus. Argus is the internal framework AnchorPoint uses to run this comparison and assemble the findings. Stewart reviews the output and writes the summary. Argus is in use internally and has not yet been run for a paying client, so it is described here as the method behind the service rather than as a product with a track record.
What monitoring is not.
- Not fraud detection, and not designed to find deliberate concealment
- Not an audit, a review, or any form of assurance
- Not independent second-party review, since the same person keeps the books and prepares the summary
- Not financial advisory, forecasting, or fractional CFO work
- Not a substitute for any part of the monthly close
Monitoring is worth buying only if the extra comparison and the written summary are useful to you. If the monthly close already tells you what you need, it is reasonable to skip it, and you will be told so.
Start with the monthly books.
Monitoring is a later conversation. The first one is about taking over Managed Accounting and getting the close running the way it should.