How to solve the financial close dilemma: 3 strategies that never fail

Shagun Malhotra
Contributor

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A CPA, CIA, and an experienced auditor and process consultant, Shagun started her career in public accounting. She has worked with Fortune 100 companies such as Marriott and Freddie Mac.

The great surge in entrepreneurship following the pandemic resulted in a significant disruption of most industries, which was mainly reflected in significant and widespread adoption of tech, both old and contemporary. Today, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being applied across multiple departments and are helping teams work in synergy at a faster pace.

Finance teams are no exception to this trend. The month-end closing process benefits greatly from automation, reducing manual errors, streamlining internal controls, executing recurring events and tasks, and providing real-time insights into the process for quicker decision-making.

However, adopting new platforms and technologies to speed up processes can be overwhelming and time-consuming, especially when you don’t know where to start. So, I’ve put together three main strategies to put you on the path to fully digitizing your business and noticeably improve the closing process.

Automate low-value tasks

The data gathered in these steps will allow you to identify your business’ root issues quickly, which will then let you assess what to do next.

There’s an increasing need to remove laborious and recurring tasks from your team’s plate so they can focus on what’s important. But when it comes to the financial closing process, what can and should be automated?

These are a few recurring tasks that, when automated, can help your team check their status or progress at a glance:

The preparation and review of balance sheet reconciliations.
Completion and management of closing checklists.
Balance sheet flux and/or P&L variance analysis.
Data analytics on the health and status of the month-end close.

The data gathered in these steps will allow you to identify your business’ root issues quickly, which will then let you assess what to do next.

Not only will the adoption of automation tools further optimize the closing process, but as technologies continue to evolve, teams that layer these together will substantially improve speed and accuracy. These investments result in financial and operational growth, offering greater analytics and aiding the decision-making process.