Most finance teams believe a slow close is caused by too much data or too few people. In my experience it’s neither. It’s almost always caused by waiting — waiting on a signature, a confirmation, a spreadsheet from a plant manager who’s on vacation.
One wholesale business I worked with closed their books in 11 days. Their CFO had two open roles she couldn’t fill, so she assumed the delay was headcount. We tracked every hour for one close cycle. Forty percent of the elapsed time was pure waiting, not working.
Where 11 days actually goes
Here’s the breakdown from that tracking exercise. It looked like almost every mid-size company I’ve been inside.
- Days 1–3: chasing inventory counts from three locations that reported in different formats.
- Days 4–6: reconciling intercompany transfers that had been recorded by hand.
- Days 7–8: waiting on two department heads to approve expense reports sitting in an inbox.
- Days 9–11: building the management report itself, mostly by copying numbers between files.
Only about three of those eleven days were real accounting judgment. The rest was logistics. You cannot hire your way out of a logistics problem.
The two changes that cut it to four days
The first was a hard cutoff. All inventory counts had to be submitted by noon on day one, in one template, from all three sites. Two locations complained. Then they adjusted.
The second was a rules-based approval layer. Purchases under $2,500 and expense reports under $500 auto-approved if they matched policy. Anything above that had a 24-hour clock — if the approver missed it, it escalated to their manager automatically, no reminder emails. Average approval time went from four days to nine hours.
Then they rebuilt the management report once. One template, tied to the same numbers the close produced, refreshed on its own. The report stopped being a task and became a byproduct. None of this required a new accounting system — it required someone to treat the close as a workflow, which is where most ERP Consulting engagements actually start.
What to fix first if you only have one month
- Record where the time goes for one close cycle. Use a shared spreadsheet, not memory. Two hours total, and genuinely eye-opening.
- Find your top three waiting points and put a deadline on each one.
- Automate approvals below a threshold you can defend. Start at $500 if you’re nervous.
- Kill any report built by copying between files. Rebuild it once, properly, or stop producing it.
That same CFO now closes in four days with the same two open roles. She eventually filled them and used the capacity for margin analysis instead of counting inventory.