You close the books three weeks after month end.
By the time you see March, it's nearly May. Every decision you made in between was made on a guess, and you only find out which guesses were wrong once the month is already gone.
Tell us what your close looks like
How long it takes, and what holds it up. A person reads it and a person replies — usually with a straight answer about whether it's worth fixing.
Would rather talk? Pick a time and it goes straight onto the calendar.
What it usually turns out to be
Nobody in your finance team is slow. In almost every case we've looked at, the delay is one of three things:
- The numbers live in four places and somebody has to reconcile them by hand every month.
- Costs land late, so revenue closes in week one and the margin on it isn't known until week three.
- One person owns the whole process, and the close waits on their calendar.
None of those is a finance problem. They're all the same problem wearing different clothes: the month's numbers were never assembled in one place as they happened.
What we'd actually do
Sit with whoever runs the close and watch one. Not a workshop — the real thing, with the real spreadsheets. By the end of it we can normally tell you which days are structural and which are habit, and roughly what each of them costs you.
If the answer is that your close is fine and the problem is somewhere else, we'll say that. See what we've fixed before to judge whether that's credible.