Month-end close preparation
Accruals, prepayments, recurring journals and reconciliations prepared before day one, not during day five — so the close becomes a review of work already done.
Why the close runs long
Ask a finance team what takes the time at month end and the answer is almost never “deciding things”. It is gathering. Pulling the same reports, rebuilding the same schedules, recalculating the same prepayment releases, waiting for a department to confirm a number they were always going to confirm, and re-keying journals that were identical last month and will be identical next month.
The judgement — is this provision still right, does this variance make sense, should this be capitalised — is a small fraction of the elapsed time and the only part that needed a qualified person. The rest is preparation, and preparation can happen before the period even ends.
What replaces it
- Recurring journals prepared and posted on schedule, with the supporting schedule generated alongside rather than reconstructed later.
- Prepayment and accrual schedules maintained continuously, so the release each month is a calculation that has already run.
- Balance sheet reconciliations pre-populated and flagged where they do not agree, instead of being built from scratch each cycle.
- Intercompany balances compared across entities before close, so mismatches are found while there is still time to fix them.
- Outstanding items chased from the people who owe them, automatically, in the days before the period ends.
- A live close status that shows what is done, what is blocked and who is blocking it — replacing the status meeting.
The control question
A fast close is not automatically a good close. Compress the timetable by removing review and you have not improved anything; you have moved the errors from being found internally to being found externally.
So the sequencing matters. Preparation is automated first, review is protected, and the time saved is deliberately spent on the parts that need a qualified person — the variance that does not make sense, the provision that has stopped being appropriate, the reconciliation with an old item nobody has explained. Those are the reasons to close faster. Getting the pack out on day three with nobody having looked properly is not.
The key-person question. Automating close preparation has a second effect that is rarely the reason people start and is often what they value most: the order of operations stops living in one person’s head. If your close currently depends on somebody knowing what has to happen before what, that is a risk with a name and a holiday entitlement.
Common questions
Does this replace our close checklist?
It replaces the parts of the checklist that are instructions to do something mechanical, and keeps the parts that are instructions to think. A good outcome is a much shorter checklist where every remaining line genuinely needs the person reading it.
What about judgemental accruals?
They stay with a person, with the working already assembled. The distinction that matters is between an accrual you calculate from data you hold — which is arithmetic — and one you estimate from knowledge you hold, which is not. Only the first should be automated.
We close in five days already. Is there anything here for us?
Possibly not, and if so we will say so. The stronger argument at that point is usually not speed but resilience: whether the close depends on one person knowing the order things must happen in, and what happens to your timetable the month they are unavailable.
See it against your own process
The quickest way to know whether this is worth doing is to walk one of your own processes through it. That is what the Finance Automation Review is —one week, ending in a ranked build plan.
How the Review worksBook a call
A first call needs nothing prepared and no system access. We reply within one working day.