A practical checklist we use with clients who dread the first week of every month.
Why closes drift
Slow closes are rarely caused by lazy staff. They are caused by information arriving late and arriving in the wrong shape. Card receipts turn up in three different inboxes, a supplier invoice sits in a project manager's drawer, and the person doing the reconciliation spends four days chasing rather than reconciling.
Move the deadline upstream
Set an internal cut-off for expense submission at the 28th, not the 5th of the following month. Communicate it once, enforce it twice, and it becomes normal. Most of the calendar you lose at month-end is spent waiting, not working.
Reconcile weekly, not monthly
A weekly thirty-minute reconciliation of bank and card feeds turns month-end into a review rather than an excavation. Clients who adopt this single habit typically save four working days per month.
Write the close checklist down
One page, in order, with an owner and a due date beside each line. When someone is on leave the close still happens. This is the single cheapest resilience measure a finance function can take.
Report on exceptions
Owners do not need forty pages. They need the five numbers that changed, the reason they changed, and what is being done about it. Everything else belongs in an appendix.
In short
None of this is complicated. It is simply work that never reaches the top of anyone's list until it causes a problem. If you would like help doing it, that is exactly what we are for — book a free discovery call and we will tell you plainly whether we can help.