Subledger Locking: Close on Your Terms
Month-end close has always had a coordination problem. As finance teams grow and operations get more complex, whether due to multiple subsidiaries, integrated AP tools like Ramp, or international entities (or all of the above), the old binary of "open" or "closed" stops working.
Here's what that looks like in practice: You want to lock AP early, so your team can keep approving invoices in Ramp without those entries bleeding into a period you've already closed. But because you can't lock AP independently, you're forced to hold off on approving every invoice until the full close is done. Backlogs pile up. Payments get delayed. Close becomes a bottleneck for the whole business.
Close management in an automated, multi-team system requires surgical precision, not an on/off switch. That’s why we built Subledger Locking.
How Rillet Does It Better
Subledger Locking lets you lock AP and AR subledgers by subsidiary, independently, before fully closing the period. It's a layer of precision on top of Rillet's Close Management, giving finance teams surgical control over the close process instead of a single binary switch.
AR and AP are where we started, but more subledgers are coming.
How It Works
Lock → Enforce → Close.
- Lock: From the Close Management page, users see a matrix of subledgers (AR and AP, for now) by subsidiary. They can lock individual subledgers, bulk-lock all AR across subsidiaries, or lock all subledgers for one subsidiary.
- Enforce: Once a subledger is locked, the system enforces it. JEs, invoices, bills, and credit memos are all blocked from posting to a locked subledger. There's no manual policing required thanks to the in-built guardrails.
- Close: Once the last subledger across all subsidiaries is locked, the books close automatically. Locking a parent subsidiary cascades to its children, so your multi-entity hierarchy is respected from the start.
What Makes This Different
Most accounting systems treat period close as binary. You lock the period, nothing posts. Full stop.
What they don't account for is the fact that modern finance teams don't operate that way. Different subledgers close on different timelines. AP needs more time than AR. One subsidiary is done before another.
Subledger Locking is built for today’s reality. The lock means what it says, instantly.
Built on Real-Time Architecture
This feature is only possible because Rillet's architecture is real-time. Since it lives inside the GL (and isn’t a bolted-on toggle to a legacy system), lock enforcement isn't a batch check that runs later. It happens at the moment of entry.
In a batch-processing system, a lock can technically be active while transactions are still queued to post against it. The fact that the GL is always current is what makes enforced locking meaningful because there's no lag between when a transaction is booked and when the lock check runs. Our check happens live. Your books are accurate the moment a lock is applied.
Subledger Locking extends Rillet’s Continuous Close thesis: month-end won’t be a scramble, but a confirmation. And now it's confirmation that you can sequence on your own terms.
What's Next
AP and AR are the most common subledgers, so that’s where we started, but this is just the beginning. We're expanding to additional subledger types based on what you need most.
Now, for the first time, your accounting team can move at its own pace. AP locked, AR still open? No one waiting, nothing slipping through.
