A report that lands 20 days late is useless for deciding anything. The cause is rarely a slow team — it is a document cycle nobody ever set up.
Most owners we work with receive their financial statements somewhere past the middle of the following month. By the time the numbers arrive, the decision they would have informed has already been made. The question we hear is always the same: is the accountant too slow? Usually not.
Where the 20 days actually go
At a health products factory we took on, the close ran 20 days. When we broke the cycle apart, the accounting itself took only a few days. The rest was chasing paper.
- 40% of invoices missing or never handed to accounting on time
- Bank reconciliation deferred to month-end, so differences pile up
- Nobody owns closing the entry window on a fixed date
- Error correction starts only after the statements have been drafted once
A slow close is a symptom. The disease is a document cycle that goes unmanaged all month.
The four steps that shorten it
The sequence we run with clients is simple, but it needs discipline rather than expensive tooling.
- Set a hard cut-off for documents — say the 5th — and do not negotiate it
- Reconcile weekly instead of monthly, so differences are resolved while small
- Automate recurring invoices and connect bank feeds to the accounting system
- Train the internal team on the cycle — training is 70% of any accounting turnaround
In that engagement the close went from 20 days to 5, data accuracy rose from 60% to 100%, and tax compliance reached 100% after three prior penalties.
How to tell your cycle needs work
If any of these is true, the problem is the cycle and not the team: reports arrive after the 15th, old invoices surface during the close, or statements get amended after approval.
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