Getting month-end close under three days
The close is slow because exceptions surface on day nine. Move the reconciliation to day one and the rest follows.
Tran Minh Duc
Principal Consultant, ERP
· 7 min read
Every slow close we have examined has the same shape: eight days of assembling data, one day of discovering it does not reconcile, and two days of firefighting.
Reconcile continuously, not at close
If reconciliation runs on every load, exceptions surface on the day they occur and get fixed by the person who caused them, while they still remember.
By the time the period ends there is nothing left to discover, which is what turns eleven days into three.
“By the time the period ends there should be nothing left to discover.”
One chart of accounts, actually one
Multi-site organisations usually claim one chart of accounts and operate four, with mappings maintained in a spreadsheet. Consolidation then requires a human who understands all four.
Automate the intercompany elimination
Intercompany is where most of the manual close effort hides. It is also the most automatable part, because the rules are stable and the data is structured.
Tran Minh Duc
Principal Consultant, ERP
Writes about the work as it actually goes, including the parts that reflect badly on us.
