A leading finance company's monthly close crept into the middle of the following month, and any ad-hoc report took two weeks. We rewired the close cycle end-to-end — closing books 12× faster and dropping the report TAT from 15 days to overnight.
By the time the CFO saw last month's numbers, the current month was almost over. Reporting requests took 15 days because every cut required a fresh pull, reformat and reconciliation.
The close was a relay race with too many handoffs. Data-collection alone took 12 days because five entities emailed workbooks to a single consolidation team. Reconciliation ate another 10, and every review cycle bounced numbers back to the source.
Reporting was worse. Ad-hoc requests joined a queue that ran on Excel, PDF and calendar time — 15 days average, hitting 22 in month-close weeks.
Manual consolidationExcel handoffsLate accrualsNo single truth
We stopped treating the close as a monthly project and made it a nightly job. Sub-ledgers reconcile daily, accruals post automatically, and by day-3 the only work left is sign-off.
Sub-ledgers, bank feeds and operational systems replace Excel handoffs. Data lands nightly.
Reconciliation, adjustments and accruals run every night. By month-end the delta is small.
Standard adjustments, allocations and inter-company eliminations are code, not tickets.
Semantic model + dashboards mean any cut is a click, not a two-week Excel exercise.
Two headline numbers moved, and everything downstream moved with them — cash-flow forecasting, board pack, audit prep.
"We used to steer the business with rear-view numbers. Now the board sees the previous month by day-4 — and any question about the current month gets a real answer the next morning."
A living close pipeline and a semantic reporting layer — everything shipped as owned artifacts.