Are you finding that your finance team gets more stressed during the close process? Any good ideas to help teams feel more at ease?
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CEO in Services (non-Government)a year ago
For me it is really about the planning process. Looking for ways to move work outside the busiest period. Morning stand up meetings during the close process are great to keep everyone on track and avoid last minute stresses as well.VP of Finance in Healthcare and Biotecha year ago
Finance professionals thrive in a structured environment. I like a two step approach to manage the close process workload?1. Setting daily goals and expectations. Knowing that you have crossed that last to-do item off your list for the day is a great feeling and giving the team the agency to change gears and work on another project or jump into a task from the next day gives a great sense of accomplishment.
2. Help your team identify the tasks that can be streamlined. All the small savings quickly add up and I am always amazed that I you can often find a few more minutes in most processes.
Senior Financial Analysta year ago
Having been through a few month ends there are always challenges.I've found having a close schedule/calendar helps a great deal. This way I know where I am in the process and where we expect everyone to be. The second issue is that often we in Finance/those in the close process are dependent on other people. At month end I've seen horrible accrual entries that don't balance or don't have any backup. Often these are submitted at the last minute which only delays the process or leads to a bad close.
There are a few things you can do to help the close process. First off, figure out what really needs to happen during the close process? Are there tasks being done that don't need to be done or that can be shifted to another less busy time of the month. Also look at automation. One of my old colleagues was working on an automatic close process using SAP. The goal was to have things just flow and reduce close to a series of button presses. I don't know how the project went. I suspect that it was not as successful as hoped for but I understand that it did lead to simplification of a variety of processes. You can look to technology to help with things especially reconciliation etc. Lastly, there used to be a busy and a quiet part of the month, I don't find that as much these days. I find that the "quiet" period is busier than it used to be.
Consider having a post close debrief and honestly examine what went well and what did not go well. You might find that you need to train people outside the department on what a "good entry" looks like. The issue is that non-finance people view "finance" as another pain that they have to deal with. This attitude needs to change. That said the business side has their own challenges and they may not know/realize or care about the impact of getting the information to you a few days later will have on everything else. During the debriefs resist the urge to have the solution be to start earlier. A better solution is to change the order/priority of transactions.
I could write more but I think that this is a long enough answer. Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.
CFOa year ago
Process, planning, communication - We have a well-planned out close process that the team is used to and follows it religiously every month-close period. Cross training also helps - Whenever a team member is "down" for any reason, we have the assigned backup team members that can step in and help.
Interdepartmental communication - good accruals would not be possible without the cooperation of business centers and we have assigned accounting liaisons who reach out regularly.
VP of Finance8 months ago
Absolutely, yes. There is of course a stress level that goes up during the close process. Where I work, we spend a lot of time looking at closing and what we can do to improve it, to have it be more reliable, less manual, having more people focused on the right roles and responsibilities versus just a handful of individuals that drive it and feel the whole pressure. I've had a lot of instances where people just feel they are not able to keep working with the amount of pressure, not necessarily at the company but even in my previous experience, closing is a very stressful time.The only thing I can share is that anticipation here is key, and using the quieter times that happen between closings to see what we could have done differently through a postmortem, ongoing discussions, and KPIs. Visualizing with simple tools such as the Gantt chart where in the process we have issues that we can outline so that we can start getting organized. For instance, where I work, I've spent quite a bit of focus on intercompany transactions because, for us as a tech company, it's complex, very sophisticated, but unfortunately manual. There are different stakeholders, it's involved and it's hard to have complete clarity. It's still stressful, but we’ve seen improvements and it’s been better than last year. In terms of process improvement and mapping things out, seeing where the inefficiencies are - yes, that's what we need to do. With that mindset, while stressful it keeps pushing you to always think ahead, by doing it this way you avoid the big periods where at least you try to smooth out as much as possible.