On the third business day of January, the controller of a $120 million food manufacturer emailed the board pack. Three years earlier, that same pack went out on day 12, and everyone had accepted it as normal.
Here’s what sat between those two numbers. None of it was about buying better software.
Where the twelve days actually went
We timed it. Not guessed — timed, with a simple log of who was waiting on what.
Four days went to building the inventory valuation in a spreadsheet because the system’s report didn’t match how the plant counted. Another three went to matching supplier invoices by hand, mostly freight bills with no purchase order behind them. Two more disappeared into accruals, because the same six entries were rebuilt from scratch every month by one person who took vacation in July.
That’s nine days of rework before anyone had analyzed a single number. The close wasn’t slow because accounting was slow. It was slow because transactions entered the system late and unclean.
The close doesn’t start on the 1st
This is the mental shift that made the difference. A three-day close is decided during the month, in the plant and on the dock, not in the finance office on the last weekend.
- Set a hard cutoff for goods receipts: anything received after 2 p.m. on the last working day goes into the next period, no exceptions, and the plant knows the rule in advance.
- Move invoice matching to the receiving clerk who actually knows what arrived, with a 48-hour turnaround. Finance only handles exceptions, which dropped from 400 a month to about 60.
- Lock the six recurring accrual templates once, with amounts reviewed monthly instead of rebuilt monthly. One afternoon of work, roughly two days back per close.
- Assign one named owner per sub-ledger reconciliation. Shared ownership is why nobody notices a $40,000 variance until audit season.
The fifteen minutes that fixed the handoffs
During close week they run a 15-minute standup at 8:30, plant controller, AR lead, AP lead, inventory clerk. Each person says one thing: what they’re waiting on. That’s it.
It sounds too simple to matter. In the first month it surfaced a blocked receipt that would have pushed the close by two days. The whole conversation took eleven minutes.
If you’re bringing in ERP Consulting to fix a slow close, watch whether they spend their first week in the finance office or on the shop floor. The answer tells you a lot about whether you’ll get a real result or a nicer-looking report.
What to do this month
Before you change anything, log one close. Write down every day, who was waiting, and on what. Most controllers find two-thirds of the delay sits in three or four repeat offenders, and half of those are outside finance entirely.
Fix the top one first. Don’t redesign the whole close in a single heroic project — that’s how you get a beautiful process map and no behavior change.