Most finance teams describe their close as "slow" without being able to name where the time actually goes. That vagueness is the problem — you can’t fix a five-day close by working faster for five days, you fix it by finding the two days that are dead time.
Track this for one close cycle: how much of the close is you actually doing something, versus waiting — for a bank feed to catch up, for a colleague to send a number, for an approval. Most teams find waiting time is nearly half the cycle, and it’s invisible because it doesn’t feel like "work."
Accruals are disproportionately slow because they require judgment, not just data entry — "did we receive this service by month-end" isn’t answerable from the GL alone. The fix isn’t doing accruals faster, it’s documenting the judgment calls once so they don’t get re-litigated every month.
Bank rec, AR aging, AP aging, and intercompany reconciliation are usually done in whatever order a person gets to them, not in dependency order. Bank rec should usually go first, since several other reconciliations depend on a clean cash position.
The final 10% of a close — the two or three stubborn variances nobody can explain — regularly eats 30% of the timeline, because it’s the part that can’t be delegated or batched.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth timing your own close cycle once, honestly, before assuming the fix is a new tool rather than a sequencing change. See how AI Month-End Close handles the named deliverables →