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OVERVIEW

Although many large organizations have made massive inroads into fast and accurate month-end reporting the vast majority of finance teams around the world have month-end processes that are career limiting, to say the least.

This chapter explores the processes you can abandon, those you need to bring forward, and when the cutoffs should occur. All these changes can occur before your next month-end. Many of these practices are common sense; however, common sense is not always evident.

Many large organizations have made massive inroads into fast and accurate month-end reporting. I say to them, “Celebrate your achievement,” but still read this chapter as you may be able to achieve a quicker month-end close. However, the vast majority of finance teams around the world have month-end processes that are career limiting. This chapter is an extract from my white paper, “Reporting rapidly, informatively and error free.”20

When I was a corporate accountant, each month-end had a life of its own. You never knew when and where the next problem was going to come from. Two or three days away, we always appeared to have it under control, and yet each month we were faxing (email was not on the scene then) the result five minutes before the deadline. Our fingers were crossed as a series of late adjustments had meant that the quality assurance (QA) work we had done was invalid and we did not have the luxury of doing the QA again. Does this sound familiar?

CEOs need to demand a complete and radical change if they are to free management and accountants from the shackles of a zero-sum process – reporting last month's results halfway through the following month. Here are the facts:

● Leading finance teams are now providing commentary and numbers by the first working day.

● Companies are migrating to closing the month on the same day each month (i.e., months are either four or five weeks).

● In leading organizations, the senior management team (SMT) is letting go of report writing – SMT members are no longer rewriting reports. They have informed the board that they concur with the writer's findings but it is a delegated report.

See the attached electronic media for a checklist of implementation steps to reduce month-end reporting time frames and for the common bottlenecks in month-end reporting and techniques to get around them.