Ask a controller what they did last weekend and the answer is usually close. A 260-person food producer finished its month-end close on day 14, every month, for six years. The finance team had stopped calling it a problem.
It was a symptom, not a schedule. Here is the timeline we found on day one of the review.
Where the 14 days actually went
- Days 1 to 3: waiting for the warehouse to count inventory and email a spreadsheet.
- Days 4 to 6: three people reconciling that spreadsheet against the general ledger by hand.
- Days 7 to 9: chasing 40 open purchase orders with no receipt recorded.
- Days 10 to 12: manual journal entries for freight, rebates, and production scrap.
- Days 13 to 14: rework. Something broke on day 10 and got fixed on day 13.
Notice what is missing from that list: accounting judgment. Almost two weeks went to moving data between people.
Three changes that cut nine days
None of them required new software. All three required someone to own the process and keep owning it.
- Receiving started scanning against the purchase order the moment a truck arrived. Days 7 to 9 disappeared because open receipts stopped existing.
- Inventory moved to weekly cycle counts of 60 items instead of one giant month-end count. The warehouse stopped being the bottleneck.
- Freight and rebate accruals became rules that ran every night. Three days of journal entries turned into a 20-minute review.
By month five the close finished on day 5. By month nine, on day 4. Nothing about the accounting changed — only when the data was captured and who was accountable for it.
Where most companies stop too early
The team wanted to declare victory at day 5. I pushed for one more habit: a 30-minute review on day 6 where every close task owner says what broke and what they did about it.
That is the part of ERP Consulting companies underinvest in — process ownership, not configuration. A close that finishes in four days but breaks forty times is a fragile close.
Pick your three biggest close bottlenecks and write them on a wall this week. Assign one owner and one deadline to each. Six years of frustration usually comes down to three tasks nobody owned.