When I walked into this business, the month-end close was taking 20 working days. And it closed simply because another one has started. That meant the board pack wasn't landing until almost the end of the following month. The PE sponsor was getting increasingly vocal about it. Their operating partner had started attending monthly finance calls, which is never a good sign.
The finance team was working flat out. Late nights at period end, weekends lost to reconciliations, a controller who hadn't taken a proper holiday in two years because nobody else could do what she did. And despite all that effort, the numbers were still being questioned at every board meeting.
This is the story of how we got that close down to 5 days. Not with a big technology transformation. Not by throwing more bodies at it. By treating the close like the operations problem it actually is.
The mess we inherited
Let me paint the picture properly, because the starting conditions matter.
The business had grown through acquisition — three bolt-ons in four years. Each acquired entity had kept its own chart of accounts, its own processes, its own way of doing things. There was no standardised close process across the group. Each entity closed at its own pace, and consolidation happened last, manually, in a spreadsheet that only one person understood.
Month-end involved 47 manual journal entries. Forty-seven. Some of them were reversing journals that existed solely to fix other journals. Several reconciliations were being performed on accounts that hadn't moved in over a year — legacy items nobody had thought to question. The bank reconciliation alone took three days because it involved matching transactions across seven bank accounts with no automated feed.
The board pack was a 60-page document that took the FD three days to compile after the numbers were "final." And I use that word loosely, because there were usually at least two restatements before the PE sponsor accepted them.
Everyone was busy. Nobody was effective.
What we fixed first — and it wasn't technology
The instinct when you see a 20-day close is to look at the systems. Can we automate something? Can we buy a tool? That's usually the wrong starting point.
The first thing we did was map the close anatomy. Every single task that happened between Day 1 and Day 20. Who did it, how long it took, what it depended on, and what depended on it. We used a whiteboard, sticky notes, and three sessions with the finance team where I asked them to walk me through exactly what they did, in what order, and why.
This exercise alone was revelatory. The team had never seen their own close process laid out end to end. They could see for the first time where the bottlenecks were, where tasks were being done sequentially that could run in parallel, and — critically — where tasks were being done that added no value at all.
We found 11 reconciliations that could be eliminated entirely. Accounts that hadn't moved, balances that were immaterial, reconciliations that existed because "we've always done them." We found that the revenue recognition process was waiting for a report from operations that wasn't needed until two weeks later. We found that the intercompany elimination was being done twice — once at entity level and once at group — because of a miscommunication that had become embedded as process.
Building the close calendar
From the anatomy map, we built a close calendar. Not a list of tasks with deadlines — a proper visual calendar showing every task, its owner, its duration, its dependencies, and the critical path.
The critical path is the key concept here. In any close process, there's a sequence of tasks that determines the minimum possible close time. Everything else is either parallel work or has slack. If you don't know your critical path, you're optimising blindly.
Our critical path ran through: revenue recognition, cost accruals, intercompany, consolidation, management accounts, board pack. Everything else — fixed asset registers, prepayments, payroll postings, VAT — could theoretically run in parallel. But it wasn't, because nobody had ever mapped it that way.
The six things we changed
1. Shifted pre-close tasks before month end
This was the single biggest win. We identified every task that could be performed before the month actually closed. Prepayment schedules, depreciation runs, recurring accruals for known amounts, intercompany billing — none of these need to wait for Day 1 of the close. We moved 12 tasks into the final week of the current month, effectively giving us a 3-day head start.
2. Eliminated stale reconciliations
Those 11 reconciliations I mentioned? Gone. We also simplified several others. The bank reconciliation moved from a three-day manual exercise to a same-day process once we set up automated bank feeds. The total time saved was roughly 4 days of effort across the team.
3. Parallelised the critical path
Once we had the close calendar, we reorganised who did what and when. Tasks that had been running sequentially were reassigned to run in parallel. This required cross-training — the controller couldn't be the only person who understood consolidation. We paired her with a management accountant for two months until the knowledge was shared.
4. Introduced hard deadlines with escalation
Previously, tasks were "done when they were done." We introduced specific deadlines for each task on the close calendar, with an escalation protocol. If a task wasn't completed by its deadline, it escalated to me within two hours. Not to punish anyone, but to unblock them. Usually the delay was caused by waiting for information from outside finance, and a quick conversation with the relevant operations manager sorted it.
5. Built a close cockpit
We created a simple tracking dashboard — nothing fancy, a shared spreadsheet initially — that showed every close task, its status, its owner, and whether it was on track. Updated twice daily during close. This gave everyone visibility and created a healthy sense of accountability. When your task is the only red item on a board that the CFO reviews every morning, you find a way to get it done.
6. Only then did we add automation
After the process was clean, we automated what made sense. Automated bank feeds. Automated recurring journals. A consolidation template that pulled from the standardised chart of accounts we'd implemented across all entities. We also built automated variance analysis that flagged anything outside expected ranges, which cut the review time significantly.
Automation applied to a broken process just gives you faster broken output.
We fixed the process first.
The results
Within 90 days of starting:
- Close cycle: 20 days to 5 days. The board pack now lands within 10 business days of month end.
- Manual journals reduced by 40%. From 47 to 28. Every remaining journal has a documented reason for existing.
- Zero restatements in the six months following the change. The numbers are right first time because the process is right.
- Team overtime eliminated. No more weekends, no more late nights at period end. The controller took her first two-week holiday in three years.
- PE sponsor confidence restored. The operating partner stopped attending monthly finance calls. That's the real measure of success.
What I'd do differently
If I did this again — there's one thing I'd change: I'd start the change management work earlier.
The process redesign took about six weeks. The cultural shift took closer to four months. People don't change how they work just because you give them a new calendar. The controller who'd been running the close her own way for eight years needed time to trust that the new process would work. The management accountants who'd never been responsible for meeting a specific deadline needed support, not just a deadline.
I spent too long assuming that a better process would sell itself. It doesn't. You have to bring people along. Explain the why, not just the what. Celebrate early wins publicly. Make it safe to flag problems without feeling like you're admitting failure.
The technical work of close optimisation is relatively straightforward. The human work is where it gets hard. If I had my time again, I'd run a proper change programme alongside the process redesign from Day 1, not bolt it on when I noticed resistance at Week 4.
The takeaway
The close isn't a finance problem. It's an operations problem. Treat it like one.
Map the process. Find the critical path. Eliminate waste. Parallelise where you can. Set clear ownership and deadlines. Build visibility. Only then automate.
And start the people work on Day 1. Because a 5-day close that nobody believes in is just a target on a slide. A 5-day close that the team owns and runs without you — that's a finance function that creates value.
If your close is still measured in weeks, the Finance Diagnostic is where to start — it maps your specific process and identifies exactly where the time is going. If you're already clear on the problem and need the transformation, the Exit-Ready Finance Transformation programme covers close optimisation as its first phase.
