Month-end close doesn't slow down where you think

Month-end close doesn’t slow down where you think it does.

Most people assume the bottleneck is the numbers — consolidating data, running reports, closing accounts. Those take time. But in most close processes, the real killer is the back-and-forth.

“Can you approve this accrual?” “I sent it to Maria.” “Maria is on vacation until the 15th.”

That’s not an accounting problem. That’s an approval routing problem.

The automations that actually speed up close aren’t the ones that pull data faster. They’re the ones that remove the ping-pong. Someone submits an expense. It goes to the right approver automatically — based on amount and category. If nothing happens in 48 hours, it escalates. The submitter gets a status update. Nobody has to chase anyone.

It sounds obvious. Most teams don’t have it.

What usually exists instead: an email thread, a shared spreadsheet with a “status” column someone updates manually, and one person in finance who follows up on everything because the process doesn’t do it for them.

Something worth doing before you automate the data side of close: map the approval side first. Find every step that requires a human decision and ask what happens when that person is unavailable. If the answer is “we wait” — that’s where the time is going.

The dashboards are fine. But they don’t close the month.

The approvals do.