How long does month end really take?

Part one: how long month end really takes

How long are finance teams spending on month end?

Six calendar days. That's the median time from the first trial balance to completed monthly consolidated financial statements in APQC's benchmark of more than 11,000 organisations. Almost a week to get from the initial numbers to a finished set of accounts.

For many teams, it takes longer. In Ledge's 2025 survey of 100 finance professionals, half took six or more working days to close, including 27% who took more than seven. Only 18% finished within three working days.

The gap between a quick close and a long one has been visible for years. Back in 2018, APQC's Perry Wiggins reported in CFO.com that the fastest quarter of 2,300 organisations closed in 4.8 calendar days or less, while the slowest quarter needed ten or more.

APQC's October 2026 guidance puts the gap in similarly stark terms: five calendar days for top performers, ten for bottom performers, using a benchmark of 10,201 organisations. Imagine having the same monthly deadline as another team, but spending twice as long reaching it.

For some groups, the wait stretches into the following month. At OG Global, management accounts were arriving three to four weeks after month end. The finance team was dealing with manual intercompany charges and shared payments across a group of more than 60 entities using Xero.

There is a practical detail to watch when comparing your own close: working days and calendar days tell different stories, and so does the finish line. One team may count the day it locks the ledger; another counts the day the management pack is approved. If your books are closed on day four but the pack goes out on day eight, finance and the rest of the business are waiting for different milestones.

And neither date tells you how much work it took to get there.

One entity or twenty: what changes?

Vena's October 2026 survey of 624 US finance and accounting professionals found an average close of 4.7 business days for single-entity teams, compared with 8.3 for teams managing more than ten entities.

For a group, finishing each set of books is only part of the job. The entities must agree on what passed between them, use consistent reporting definitions and deliver their numbers in time for the group review. An unresolved difference can send work back through accounts that everyone thought were finished.

At Cripps & Co, Deputy Financial Controller Gail Dillon described continually switching between more than 15 Xero companies and spreadsheets to check intercompany balances. Bringing both sides into one view made discrepancies easier to find. After adopting Mayday, the team reported 60% less time spent on its intercompany month-end process, down to half a day a month.

But a single entity can still have thousands of transactions, several payment processors, stock to count, revenue to defer and a queue of people who need to answer finance's questions. Comparing it with a quiet holding company tells you very little. Entity count tells you how many sets of books you have. It doesn't tell you how much is happening inside them.

So how do we begin to truly understand how long month end really takes?

Your close has three clocks

For your next three closes, track the deadline alongside the work it takes to meet it.

Example

Imagine two finance teams, each with three people working on the close:

Team A finishes two days sooner, but uses twelve more hours to do it. Add the preparation beforehand and the corrections afterwards, and the difference could be larger still. A shorter close can be valuable to the business while remaining just as demanding for the team.

To put a cost against that work, multiply the hours people actually spend closing by their fully loaded hourly cost. Reducing those hours gives the team more time for forecasting, analysis and the projects that keep slipping to next month.

The repetition makes small improvements valuable. Suppose five people each recover eight hours per monthly close. Over twelve comparable ordinary closes, that is 480 hours, or 60 eight-hour working days, available for other work. Include preparation and checking when you measure the hours, so the saving reflects the whole job.

The close after the close

There is another question to ask when someone says the books are finished: how often do they stay finished?

In Vena's survey, 78% of respondents said their team had corrected or restated numbers after marking the close complete at least once in the previous year. Even among single-entity teams, the figure was 67%.

Picture a material, unaccrued invoice arriving after the management pack has gone out. Finance checks the period, assesses the adjustment, updates the ledger and refreshes the affected reconciliation. If the change affects reported results, the pack and commentary may need updating too. Someone then has to tell the recipients which version to use.

The journal might take minutes. The surrounding work can involve several people and several versions of the same numbers. For a group, it may also reopen a counterparty balance or a consolidation adjustment.

This is why rework belongs beside the close date. A day-five sign-off followed by repeated corrections is a different achievement from a day-five sign-off that holds. Record what changed, why it changed and how much work it created. Otherwise, the same problem can keep returning while the headline close time looks perfectly respectable.

A four-day close can still be miserable

In a Reddit r/Accounting discussion about hectic closes, an anonymous poster described finishing in four business days while the team worked late around month end. Missing references, expense receipts and inventory checks were among the problems. One commenter suggested a different target:

Keeping the same deadline and getting your evenings back would be a substantial improvement. A close can look efficient in a board report while exhausting the people responsible for it.

In FloQast's 2023 survey of 500 UK finance directors and controllers, 87% reported greater stress during month-end close. Those late nights deserve a place in the conversation about what a good close looks like.

Capacity also affects the numbers. In Gartner's research, a third of 497 controllership staff reported that they or their peers made at least a few financial errors each week. The research linked errors with concerns about insufficient capacity.

A process that depends on someone remembering every exception, working through dinner and being available whenever a query arrives has little room for absence or growth. Ask who can cover the work when that person takes leave. Ask which checks happen late at night. Those answers deserve as much attention as the day the pack went out.

When the automation needs a full-time minder

One commenter in an r/Accounting discussion about close automation offered a dry recipe for an automation project: choose a tool, delegate the work, then insist the tool can only be failed by its implementer. Elsewhere in the thread, someone described getting their automation working only to find they still had to sit and watch it run.

The time spent setting up, maintaining and supervising a process belongs in the calculation too. If someone has acquired a second job looking after the automation, the work hasn't gone away.

The wider progress has been stubbornly slow. Ventana Research's 2023 financial-close study found that 58% of participants finished their monthly close within six business days, compared with 60% in 2019: essentially unchanged. Years of investment had yet to produce a clear improvement in that measure.

A useful question for any automation project, including AI, is what happens to an exception. Does the right person get the source information and a clear decision to make? Or does someone have to reconstruct what the system did before they can trust it?

For example, an AI-generated explanation of a margin movement is only ready for review if the reviewer can trace it to the relevant transactions. If they have to repeat the analysis to find out whether the explanation is true, the time saved writing it may have moved into checking it.

When month end takes most of the month

Our CFO in Residence, Felix Matthews, previously ran a close that took at least 20 working days. The Xero-based group was maintaining entity data and multi-currency work through spreadsheets, with exports and formulas needing attention as the underlying accounts changed.

“There was a lot of exporting, copying, and pasting, then updating whenever we made a change in Xero. It was suboptimal.”

After that team adopted Mayday's Balancer and Recharger, Felix estimated they were saving more than ten hours of work each month, with the saving growing as the business expanded.

Every export creates another version of the accounts to maintain. When those accounts span several entities, the versions also have to agree with one another.

Two to three days on loans alone

At Amalgamated Property Group, the team had 20 active entities in Xero. External accountants spent two to three days each month reconciling intercompany loans in spreadsheets. CFO Roxanne O'Sullivan reported that the same task took two to three hours after introducing Mayday.

Loan reconciliation gave the team a specific job to tackle and a saving they could measure. Follow one recurring task through your own close and you may find a similar opportunity.

The bottleneck may be outside finance

In Ledge's survey, 56% identified dependencies on other departments or regions as a barrier to a faster close.

Use that as a prompt to look beyond your task list. A reconciliation can take 30 minutes of work and wait two days for a missing reference. Cutting the work to ten minutes won't recover those two days.

In Ventana's 2023 research, 27% of teams using workflows for all or many processes said waits for colleagues to finish tasks were noticeable. Among teams using little or no automation, 47% said the same.

The handover is worth examining as closely as the calculation. A preparer can finish at 10am while the work sits unseen until the following afternoon. A reviewer can return a query that nobody notices before leaving. Each task looks short in isolation; the gaps between them fill the calendar.

What keeps turning up in a difficult close?

The details differ, but the same frustrations keep surfacing in these studies and stories.

The same information has to be maintained more than once. An export becomes a schedule, the schedule feeds a journal and another export feeds the reporting pack. Each change creates a question about which other versions need updating.

Work arrives before the information needed to finish it. The task is on finance's checklist, but a missing reference, stock movement or contract detail sits with someone else. The person accountable for the deadline may have little control over that input.

The process relies on knowledge in one person's head. They know which balance never agrees, which spreadsheet tab to ignore and which colleague will actually answer. The process gets through another month, but nobody else becomes more able to run it.

Finishing creates another round of work. A late journal invalidates an earlier reconciliation. An updated schedule changes the commentary. An entity correction reaches group finance after consolidation. The same numbers pass through review again.

These patterns give you a more useful starting point than asking everyone to close a day faster. Follow a delayed or repeatedly corrected balance from the original transaction to the final report. The point where it gets copied, waits for an answer or returns for another review is where to investigate first.

What should a good close give back?

An earlier finish matters when it gives people useful numbers sooner. Fewer hours matter when finance can use that time for something else. Fewer corrections matter when colleagues can work from the approved pack without checking whether another version is coming.

That might mean completing the forecast in working hours or taking leave without carrying the close laptop. It might mean having every entity’s results ready together, with time to investigate differences before the board meeting.

Judge the close by when it finishes, how much work it consumes and how well the numbers hold up afterwards. Those three measures turn “we need a faster month end” into a clear brief for improving it.

Part two: what a five-day month-end close looks like

A close calendar and a close checklist do different jobs. The calendar sets the sequence and handovers across the week; the checklist sets the preparation, reconciliation and review required before an account is signed off.

Define what finished means

A well-run close produces numbers the business can use, with reconciliations supporting the balances and a clear record of who reviewed them. Its quality should be visible alongside its speed.

Agree a definition of done before setting an ambitious deadline:

• Required transactions and adjustments have been recorded for the period.
• Material balance sheet accounts have current support and review evidence.
• Open exceptions have an owner, an assessed financial effect and a documented treatment.
• Material P&L movements have explanations supported by transactions and business context.
• The ledger and reporting pack reconcile, with a controlled process for subsequent changes.
• For groups, entity submissions, intercompany differences and consolidation adjustments have been reviewed.

Agree materiality and review requirements with your finance lead, then build the calendar around the work and the people who need to complete it.

The close starts before month end

A five-day close doesn’t mean all the work happens in five days.

Much of the accounting work can happen throughout the month: reconciling bank transactions, maintaining accrual and prepayment schedules, reviewing deferred revenue, resolving intercompany differences and keeping close tasks up to date.

The more of that work you can complete as transactions arrive, the less is left waiting when the period ends.

Some activities still depend on the final numbers, including cut-off checks, period-end adjustments and sign-off. Work completed earlier may also need reviewing for later changes. But those final days should be about completing and reviewing the close, not rebuilding everything from scratch.

The goal is to reduce the total effort needed to close, as well as the work left after period end. Automating repetitive calculations and postings can turn a recurring job from days into hours. Moving the same manual work to an earlier date leaves the workload intact.

A five-day month-end close timeline

Moving the same manual work to an earlier date leaves the workload intact.

1. Throughout the month

   Exceptions are visible and assigned.

2. Final working days before period end

   Owners know what is due and what they are waiting for.

3. Day 1

   Missing inputs have an agreed treatment and escalation.

4. Day 2

   Schedules and postings tie to the ledger.

5. Day 3

   Required balances are supported; exceptions are assessed.

6. Day 4

   Reports reconcile to the approved underlying records.

7. Day 5

   The approved pack is issued and subsequent changes are controlled.

8. After issue

   An owner and completion date exist for the improvement.

The work starts before day one. Preparing a schedule early still requires a check for later changes; moving work forward does not make it disappear.

Some tasks run in parallel. A business with complex stock, contract accounting or constrained source systems may need a different timetable. Move the dates without dropping the controls.

Part three: month-end close checklist and template

A month-end close checklist gives the finance team a single record of what needs to be prepared, reconciled, reviewed and locked before the numbers go out. Every item below can be worked through on the page or downloaded in the template to adapt for your own chart of accounts.

1. Coordinate the close and its dependencies

The friction: a green task list can conceal work waiting for review, missing evidence or a late submission.

Give every task a preparer, reviewer, due date, dependency and evidence link. Distinguish prepared, ready for review and approved. A task should identify the balance or output it supports, so people can see why its delay matters.

• Roll forward the month-end close checklist and confirm period-end dates, materiality thresholds and reporting deadlines.
• Assign a preparer, reviewer and due date to every task and balance sheet reconciliation.
• Confirm leave and reviewer availability across the close window so approvals do not bottleneck on the final day.
• Link each task to its supporting schedule or working paper location.
• For groups: issue the group close timetable, confirm entity submission deadlines and record any entity-specific exceptions.

Done means: the reviewer can find the work, its support and any unresolved issue without asking the preparer to reconstruct it.

For a small team, one person may prepare several areas. Where independent review isn't available within the team, agree appropriate oversight with the finance lead or external accountant.

2. Confirm completeness and the cut-off

The friction: finance waits for every last invoice while the reporting deadline approaches.

Set submission deadlines with sales, operations, purchasing and payroll. Track outstanding items, then determine the accounting treatment using the underlying evidence and your policy. Review subsequent supplier bills, deliveries and expense claims for activity belonging to the period being closed.

• Communicate cut-off deadlines to purchasing, sales, operations and budget holders for bills, expense claims and customer billing.
• Ensure goods received and services delivered before period end are matched to supplier bills or listed for accrual.
• Confirm all sales invoices, credit notes and dispatches for the period have been raised and posted in the correct period.
• Review post-period supplier bills, goods deliveries and expense submissions to identify unrecorded liabilities.
• For groups: log source-system cut-off and submission status by entity, separating operational inputs (such as payroll files) from intercompany cut-off.

Done means: the team has considered missing activity and cut-off, with documented accruals or other treatment where required. Reaching a deadline doesn't make an incomplete source complete.

3. Reconcile cash, cards and payment processors

The friction: a payout arrives net of fees, refunds and timing differences, and somebody has to explain the gap.

Check each balance against an independent source. Reconcile clearing accounts as well as the bank. Give outstanding items a date, explanation and owner, and investigate older items rather than rolling them forward unchanged.

Keeping up with reconciliations throughout the month can change the rhythm of the work. At RSGx, intercompany bank reconciliations across the group used to take hours at month end. The team now reconciles and checks them in Mayday every day, in minutes.

• Reconcile all bank accounts, petty cash and foreign-currency cash accounts to independent bank statements at the period-end date.
• Reconcile corporate credit cards, expense cards and employee reimbursement clearing accounts, posting unsubmitted card spend where material.
• Reconcile payment processor and merchant clearing accounts (such as Stripe, GoCardless or PayPal), accounting separately for gross receipts, merchant fees, refunds and cash in transit.
• Review aged unreconciled bank lines, unpresented payments and uncleared lodgements; investigate and clear stale items.
• For groups: identify cash receipts or payments settled by one entity on behalf of another and match them across the group.

Xero check: compare the statement balance in Xero with the actual bank balance for the same date. Xero's reconciliation guidance identifies missing, duplicated, deleted and manually created statement lines as possible sources of differences. A tidy reconciliation screen is not sufficient evidence that the feed was complete.

In the 12 months to September 2026, teams worked through over 110,000 cross-entity bank reconciliations in Mayday, matching over 170,000 invoices.

Done means: the balances reconcile, or every reconciling item has a supported explanation and appropriate treatment.

4. Review receivables, payables and payroll

The friction: the control account balances, but the underlying detail contains old credits, missing bills or items posted to the wrong period.

Tie receivable and payable listings to their control accounts. Review aged balances, unapplied cash, credit notes and unusual movements. Reconcile payroll expense and liabilities to approved payroll records and settlements; consider unpaid amounts and relevant accruals.

• Reconcile the aged accounts receivable (AR) listing to the AR control account; review unallocated cash, old credit notes and debit balances on supplier accounts.
• Assess overdue receivables and update the bad debt or expected credit loss provision in line with policy.
• Reconcile the aged accounts payable (AP) listing to the AP control account; investigate debit balances, duplicate bills and old unallocated payments.
• Reconcile gross payroll, employer taxes, pension contributions and benefits to the approved payroll summary.
• Reconcile net wages, PAYE/NIC (or local payroll tax), pension and benefit control accounts to subsequent payments; accrue unpaid commissions, bonuses or holiday pay where required.
• For groups: separate trade AR and AP with related parties from third-party balances so they can be agreed before consolidation.

Done means: balances are supported by usable detail and the team has assessed recoverability, completeness and classification. A matching total is the start of that review.

5. Maintain accruals, prepayments and deferred revenue

The friction: the schedule adds up, but a new contract, cancellation or credit note hasn't reached it.

Maintain a record connecting source documents, coverage dates, policy, calculations, approved adjustments and ledger postings. Reconcile opening balance, additions, releases and other changes to the closing balance. Decide the treatment of accrual reversals and actual invoices explicitly so costs aren't duplicated.

Teams using Mayday applied over 820,000 deferral treatments to prepayment and deferred revenue lines in the 12 months to September 2026. Each treatment involves a start date, duration and account.

• Reverse prior-month reversing accruals and check that actual supplier bills have not been double-counted against remaining specific accruals.
• Calculate and post current-period accruals for unbilled costs, utilities, professional fees and variable commitments, attaching supporting evidence.
• Update the prepayment schedule for new annual or multi-period bills, confirm service coverage dates, post monthly releases and tie the closing schedule to the balance sheet.
• Update deferred revenue and accrued income schedules for new contracts, renewals, upgrades and credit notes; post revenue deferrals and releases in line with the contract and revenue recognition policy.
• Reconcile opening balance, additions, releases and adjustments to the closing ledger balance for each schedule.

For example: a £12,000 annual software bill dated 15 March might cover the twelve months from 1 April, or include a one-off onboarding fee alongside the licence. The invoice date and headline total alone don't settle the schedule.

Done means: the schedule reflects current evidence and ties to the ledger after posting.

Apply the same discipline to deferred revenue, while recognising that the contract and applicable accounting policy determine when revenue is earned. Don't assume every contract should be spread evenly.

Harriet Hope, VP of Finance at Arbolus, describes the change to her team's prepayment work: “The prepayments tool replaces a manual, error-prone calculation with something automated that you can easily track.”

6. Close inventory, fixed assets, financing and tax balances

The friction: an apparently routine balance depends on an operational judgement or a source outside finance.

Assign the relevant specialists. Reconcile inventory and work in progress to supporting records, investigate count differences and assess valuation. Reconcile asset movements and depreciation. Review debt, interest, leases, foreign-currency revaluations and tax accounts where applicable, using the business's accounting policies and reporting requirements.

• Reconcile inventory and work in progress to stock records or count sheets; post adjustments for shrinkage, obsolescence or net realisable value provisions.
• Update the fixed asset and intangible asset registers for additions, capitalised development costs and disposals; post monthly depreciation and amortisation and tie to the ledger.
• Reconcile loan balances, covenant metrics and accrued interest to lender statements.
• Update lease schedules (such as IFRS 16 or ASC 842 right-of-use assets and lease liabilities) and post monthly interest and depreciation where applicable.
• Post equity and reserve movements where required, including share capital changes, RSUs and share-based payment charges.
• Run foreign-currency revaluations on monetary assets, liabilities and cash accounts using the agreed closing rates.
• Reconcile VAT/GST, sales tax and corporation tax control accounts to returns, payments and provision calculations.

Foreign-currency errors can follow a transaction all the way into consolidation. Jon Mahood, Finance Director at Laundryheap, described the risk in manually adjusting intercompany transactions: “When you're doing it manually you can't guarantee you’re going to get the exchange rates correct.” He described how those differences can leave intercompany balances out of agreement at consolidation and difficult to untangle when an audit comes around.

Done means: each applicable material account has current evidence and a completed review. Mark genuinely inapplicable tasks as such, with a reason.

Monthly review of a tax control account does not mean every business has a monthly tax filing obligation. Keep the statutory calendar distinct from the close checklist.

7. Review journals and the whole balance sheet

The friction: journals are correct individually, but a late posting invalidates a reconciliation that was already signed off.

Require supporting evidence, period, entity, account coding and approval for adjustments. Keep a visible record of postings after account review and refresh affected reconciliations. Test the final ledger against the final schedules, rather than an earlier export.

• Check that every manual journal has a clear description, calculation or source attachment, preparer and reviewer approval.
• Clear suspense, clearing and misposting accounts to nil (or to a documented, reviewed balance).
• Verify that every material balance sheet account has a completed reconciliation tied to the current trial balance, not an earlier draft.
• Re-verify any reconciliation where a journal was posted to that account after initial sign-off.
• Ensure open reconciling items and exceptions have an assigned owner, assessed financial impact and target resolution date.

Done means: the approved balance sheet has support behind each material balance, and post-review changes have been considered.

In a group, an adjustment can also affect a counterparty, an elimination or a group report. Include those dependencies in the change process.

8. Agree intercompany and recharges

This step covers transactions between entities; departmental allocations may also need review.

The friction: each entity is individually ready, but the amounts between them disagree.

Agree transaction dates, allocation rules, account mappings and counterparty treatment before posting. Compare both sides using an agreed currency basis. Separate timing, missing postings, exchange differences and genuine disagreements. Avoid plugging a difference merely to produce a nil balance.

The posting work adds up across entities. In the 12 months to September 2026, Recharger averaged around 19 posted intercompany invoices and bills per calculation, with over 114,000 postings from more than 6,000 calculations.

• Calculate and post monthly intercompany and departmental recharges (cost, revenue, management fees and shared overheads) using agreed allocation rules and tax treatments.
• Reconcile intercompany loan accounts and intercompany trade AR/AP across every entity pair in both transaction currency and reporting currency.
• Investigate and resolve mismatches caused by missing bills, timing differences, unallocated cash or exchange rate differences before group lock.
• Confirm reciprocal revenue and cost accounts, or intercompany loan balances, agree across counterparties so they eliminate cleanly on consolidation.

Done means: reciprocal positions agree or have documented, reviewed reconciling items; required corrections are posted; the consolidation team can trace the positions.

Tyler Caskey of TheBeanCounters described a client with 40 entities and roughly nine intercompany loans per entity:

The practical lesson is to make the process transferable and focus review on exceptions, instead of depending on one person's knowledge of the workbook.

Missing loan entries, currency revaluations and interest postings all add to that recurring workload. In the 12 months to September 2026, Mayday users posted over 55,000 journals to fill in missing intercompany loan entries, alongside over 16,000 foreign exchange revaluations and nearly 10,000 interest postings.

9. Complete financial review and group reporting

The friction: commentary repeats the movement without explaining it. “Costs increased because spending was higher” is a sentence, but it gives the reader little to act on.

Review the P&L, balance sheet and cash movements together. Explain material changes using transactions and operational context. Distinguish timing, one-off items, volume, price and changes in classification where relevant. Record what remains uncertain and who needs to act.

• Perform month-on-month, budget and prior-year variance analysis across the P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statement.
• Investigate unexpected margin movements, negative balances and coding anomalies down to transaction level, correcting mispostings before lock.
• Draft variance commentary that explains the operational and transactional drivers behind material movements.
• For groups: align entity reporting mappings, translate foreign-subsidiary results at agreed average and closing rates, post intercompany eliminations and review consolidation adjustments (such as unrealised profit in inventory).
• Tie the final management reporting pack, KPI tables and board slides back to the underlying ledger and consolidation output.

Done means: the pack reconciles to the approved records, material movements have meaningful explanations and the intended decision-makers can use it.

10. Sign off and control what happens next

The friction: management receives a report, then somebody changes the period underneath it.

Record the final approval and retain the issued pack with its supporting evidence. Establish who can authorise a late adjustment, how its effect is assessed and when recipients need a revised report.

• Obtain final controller or CFO sign-off on the balance sheet reconciliations, trial balance and management pack.
• Lock the accounting period in the general ledger and connected subledgers to prevent backdated changes.
• Archive the approved management pack, trial balance and reconciliation snapshot for audit and future reference.
• Log any late-arriving material adjustments requested after lock, assessing whether to reopen the period or book them in the following month.

Xero check: Xero's lock dates restrict changes to earlier transactions, with settings that can distinguish all users from users without the advisor role. Apply the appropriate setting and review the procedure for changing it. A lock date supports the control; it does not replace sign-off.

Done means: everyone knows which numbers were approved, and any subsequent change is visible and controlled.

Part four: improving your next month-end close

Where AI helps, and how it can create more work

AI can help classify inputs, propose matches and draft explanations. The useful test is whether it reduces the full effort to reach an approved result, including checking and correction.

That checking time matters. A survey reported by the Journal of Accountancy in February 2026 found that 86% of 100 CFOs surveyed said their finance teams had encountered inaccurate or hallucinated AI data.

In the 12 months to September 2026, teams applied AI-suggested treatments to over 330,000 lines in Mayday. They applied 62% exactly as Recogniser suggested and adjusted at least one detail, such as the account or schedule, on the remaining 38%.

Consider these examples of how AI-assisted month-end work could go wrong, and what a reviewer would need to check:

Eventus offers a useful example of putting that review into practice. In a 2025 Journal of Accountancy interview, the firm described an AI tool that drafts technical accounting memos using its existing memos as source material. Accountants then review and correct the drafts. The team gave AI a specific job and kept the checking inside the workflow.

For a trial in your own team, choose a narrow task and compare three things: time to approved output, errors found and exceptions escalated. Include setup, review and rework in the measurement. Keep source evidence, approval and posting authority clear. ACCA's guidance on adopting AI similarly emphasises governance, confidentiality and professional judgement when accounting firms adopt AI.

Choose the next improvement from your last close

Use this short review with the team. Answer with examples from the close you just completed.

Pick one change, assign an owner and measure it at the next close. Compare elapsed time, total hours and corrections together. A faster deadline achieved through more late nights needs a different response from a slow close waiting on one late input.