Finance operations
Summary
Almost every long close is the same story told nine times over: a job your accounting system cannot finish, handed to a person to finish by hand, every single month, forever. Below are nine of them described the way they actually happen. Eight are about the software. One is genuinely about a person — and it is not the one you would guess.
The starting gun
You cannot close a month while the month is still arriving. The card statement lands on the 4th. Two suppliers invoice in arrears. Somebody in the field has receipts in a jacket pocket. So the first stretch of your fortnight is not work at all — it is waiting, punctuated by chasing.
Nobody counts those days as part of the close, which is exactly why the close never gets shorter. You are optimising the part you can see.
The rebuild
He wants it split by division. Or by site, or by contract. Your accounting file keeps one set of books, so it cannot give him that, and everybody has quietly accepted the workaround: export the trial balance, drop it into the workbook, and let the mapping tab do the splitting.
That mapping tab is maintained by exactly one person, has not been reviewed since it was built, and is now a load-bearing part of how your company understands itself.
The wrong shape
Your system will happily produce an aged receivables report. It will not produce it the way anybody in your business actually asks the question — by rep, by branch, by the terms you negotiated rather than the terms on file.
So it gets exported and reshaped. Every month. By hand. And the reshaping is invisible in the audit trail, so if the answer is wrong, the only way to discover that is for somebody to notice.
The argument
The detail says one thing and the control account says another, and the gap has to be chased down through a month of postings until somebody finds the entry that went to the wrong place.
This is treated as a monthly chore rather than as information. It is information. A sub-ledger that has to be reconciled is a sub-ledger that is not actually part of the ledger — it is a separate book that has agreed to be similar.
From memory
The recharge between the two companies. The allocation of the shared overhead. The one adjustment that has to go in before anything else ties.
There is no rule recorded anywhere for how it is calculated. There is a person who remembers how they did it in January, and does it that way again. It is not wrong. It is simply a policy that exists only inside somebody’s head, being applied to your statutory accounts.
Rolled forward by hand
Prepayments. Accruals. Fixed assets, if you are unlucky. Each one is a tab with last month’s figures copied into this month’s column and adjusted.
Copy-and-adjust is a fine way to work until the month somebody copies the wrong column, and then it is a fine way to be wrong for a year without noticing, because every subsequent month inherits the error and looks perfectly consistent.
The hunt
It is not a big number. That is what makes it expensive. Big differences announce themselves and get fixed in an hour; small ones are too small to write off and too small to be obvious, so they get hunted.
And when it is finally found, it is almost never interesting — a duplicate, a transposition, something coded to the right amount and the wrong place. You have spent a day and a half proving that nothing was actually wrong.
The only human one
This is the one on the list that is genuinely about a person, and I want to be careful about it, because it is usually described unfairly.
Somebody in your finance function carries the reasons. Why that contract was treated as deferred. Why the March restatement happened. Why one customer sits outside the normal terms. When they are away, the close slows down, and everybody notices.
That is not carelessness and it is not indispensability. It is what happens when a system has nowhere to write down a reason. The knowledge went into a person because there was no field for it. Ask yourself how much of your close is currently stored in one skull, and what your plan is for the fortnight they finally take off.
The one that isn’t in the close at all
Most people who open an article like this leave somewhere around the third reason, because the third reason is where it stops being a list of annoyances and starts being a description of their week. If you are still here, you have been doing arithmetic in your head for eight entries and you already know roughly what this costs you.
So here is the ninth, and it is the only one that never appears on any close checklist.
By the time the numbers are right, they describe a month that finished a fortnight ago. Every decision taken in between — the hire, the price change, the order you did or didn’t place, the customer you kept extending — was taken on the last set of numbers you trusted, which were already old when you got them.
Nobody puts a figure on that, and I am not going to invent one for you. But it is larger than the fortnight, and it is the actual reason to fix any of this.
What it costs
What fixes the nine above is a system that keeps the divisions, the schedules, the reasons and the sub-ledgers inside the ledger instead of beside it. For a business your size that means Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and the reason you have not already got it is what it has historically cost to get onto it.
“A standard BC implementation runs three to six months and $40k–$150k in partner fees.”
— our own published figure for the traditional route, on footing.tech. That is Clear Horizon’s assessment of the conventional path, not a third-party study, and I am not going to present it as one.
Footing is that project productised: the repeating configuration work automated, the fee for it printed on a website instead of quoted in a meeting, and the same Microsoft partner still doing the parts that need a person. Here is the whole price list.
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Before you go
There are businesses this size whose sub-ledgers tie first time and whose reports come out of the system in the shape people ask for. If that is you, your accounting software fits your company and you should keep it, and no amount of my writing changes that. This was written for the other kind — and if you recognised your own week in more than four of the nine, you already know which kind you are.
Advertisement — disclosure
This article is a paid advertisement. It was written and published by Clear Horizon Solutions Corp. to promote Footing, its own productised onboarding service for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. It is not independent editorial, it has not been reviewed by anybody impartial, and every link on this page goes to a page selling that service.
The author sells what the article recommends. "Jay at Footing Tech" is the CEO who runs Clear Horizon Solutions Corp., a Microsoft partner. If you act on this article, Clear Horizon is one of the firms that stands to benefit, which is why the pricing is printed in full above rather than hidden behind a form, and why the section immediately before this one tells a whole category of reader not to bother.
The three-to-six month and $40,000–$150,000 figures quoted above are Clear Horizon Solutions’ own published statement about traditional implementations, not third-party research. No external studies or statistics are cited anywhere in this article. Prices shown are Footing’s published pricing at the time of writing. Nothing on this page is an offer; the quote you generate is.
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