Month-end close in Mexico: a guide for foreign controllers

Two audiences for one Mexican close

Your group wants figures fast, often by working day three to five, under your reporting framework. The SAT, Mexico's tax administration, wants accurate monthly tax figures based on Mexican rules and documents. A local accountant usually prepares the Mexican filings from the same ledger.

Most problems come from treating these as one task done once. A better model is a two-pass close: a fast pass for group reporting, and a confirmation pass that ties every peso of revenue to a CFDI and every collected peso to a deposit before local filings.

Step one: reconcile the peso bank accounts

Everything else depends on cash. For each Mexican bank account:

1. Download the PDF statement (estado de cuenta) for the period.
2. Check opening balance plus credits minus debits equals closing balance.
3. Separate internal transfers, reversals and fees from customer receipts.
4. Match each customer deposit to an open invoice or to a payment plan.
5. List what remains: unidentified deposits, unpaid invoices and timing items.

If the statement layout is unfamiliar, how to read a Mexican bank statement walks through the fields.

Step two: tie CFDI documents to the money

A CFDI is the electronic invoice that every Mexican issuer registers with the SAT. Three checks keep the tax side consistent with the bank:

Check	What should agree
Invoices issued as PUE (paid at once)	Deposits received in the same period
Payment receipts (complementos de pago) issued	Deposits applied to PPD invoices
Cancelled or replaced CFDIs	Adjustments in your receivables ledger

PUE and PPD are the payment method codes on an invoice; PPD invoices need a payment receipt for each payment collected. A deposit applied in your ledger but missing a receipt is a gap your accountant will ask about.

Step three: hand off for SAT filings

At a high level, a Mexican company has monthly obligations that include provisional income tax (ISR) and VAT (IVA) payments, generally due by the 17th of the following month, plus electronic accounting submissions and informative returns with their own deadlines. The exact list depends on the entity's regime and activities. Your local accountant owns this list; your job is to deliver reconciled data on time.

A useful hand-off pack contains the reconciled bank statements, the receivables ageing, the list of CFDIs issued and cancelled, and a short note on open items.

A close calendar that fits both deadlines

Illustrative timeline for an October close:

Working day	Task	Owner
1	Download statements, run first bank match	AR / shared services
2	Resolve unidentified deposits, issue missing payment receipts	AR with local team
3	Group reporting pass	Group controller
4–6	CFDI against deposits review	Local accountant
By the 17th	Provisional tax payments filed	Local accountant

Weekly matching during the month shortens day one considerably. Unmatched deposits are easier to resolve while customers still remember paying.

Dollar accounts and exchange differences

Many Mexican entities hold a US dollar account alongside the peso account. Reconcile each one in its own currency first, then translate. Customers sometimes pay a peso invoice from a dollar account, or the reverse, so the amount on the statement will not equal the invoice. Agree with your accountant which exchange rate the entity uses for receipts, and book the difference as an exchange gain or loss rather than leaving it in receivables.

Open items to carry forward deliberately

Every close leaves something open. Typical Mexican items are deposits without a clear payer, customer overpayments held as credit balances, and invoices paid after month end but before the close. List each with an owner and a target date. A deposit that stays unexplained for months is not just untidy; in Mexico it can become a tax question, explained in unidentified deposits in Mexico.

Shortening step one with Meses

Matching deposits is the slowest manual step for most teams. Meses (meses.ai) is built for it: Meses is the AI platform for collections reconciliation in Latin America: it matches bank-statement deposits to what customers owe (dues, tuition, rent, instalments or invoices) and updates your records in minutes. Meses writes only approved changes, confirms they were saved correctly and lets you undo them. The month-by-month flow is described in how to reconcile a month.