Faster Financial Closing & Reporting

This course will show you how to implement a closing process that eliminates wasteful effort while ensuring the integrity and quality of a company’s financial information.

Learn how to gain extra time and resources for other value-adding work, deliver information for decision-makers within days - not weeks, and increase the efficiency in your close process.

The course will include real life examples of companies that have successfully implemented faster financial closing.

Key Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the performance benefits of faster closing and reporting
• Gain a clearer, structured process to ongoing improvements in faster month/year-end closes
• Learn how to close the month-end books and issue financial statements as fast as possible
• Learn how to shift the timing of closing activities out of the core closing period
• Learn how to implement required controls to keep financials accurate despite the fast close
• Identify common areas of delay and how to overcome them
• Reduce the level of manual intervention needed for reconciliation
• Learn how to enhance the existing controls within the close and consolidation process

Outline:

• Achieving faster high-quality closes
• Current best practice in financial closing
• Achieving increased efficiency and effectiveness in the close process
• Optimising across the cycle – understanding the interconnections between all activities
• Achieving greater data integrity
• Improving the balance between production, analysis, and understanding the numbers to have more time to really get into the numbers
• Complexities to understand and overcome
• Technical and accounting issues
• Information collection, transfer and manipulation
• Alignment between processes and organisational structure
• The impact of the complexity of the operating structure of the company on the close process
• Automating closing activities and standardising financial systems
• Eliminating inefficiencies in the closing process
• What are the most time- and resource-consuming portions of close cycles?
• Reducing the risk of manual error and eliminating the need to run an early “soft” close and move directly to a “fast” close
• Close cycle automation: how technology can contribute to improved financial closing
• Building standardisation and automated controls into the process to achieve data integrity and ‘clean’ results
• Common misconceptions
• Redesigning the close process
• Revising close processes to reduce manual intervention, eliminate redundancy and rework, and streamline and standardise reporting
• Tools to re-engineer the closing process
• Qualitative and quantitative measures
• Shifting the timing of closing activities out of the core closing period
• What steps can be accelerated into the pre-close period?
• How new technology can improve financial closing
• Transitioning from a spreadsheet culture to enterprise systems
• Post-close activities
• Overview of post-close activities
• Management review and sign-off of the consolidated numbers
• Annotation and audit
• Report preparation
• Faster financial reporting
• New reporting trends
• Simple techniques to improve the month end reporting process
• Reducing the content of the monthly report
• How to speed up board reporting
• Anticipating and planning for changes in reporting standards and requirements
• Bottlenecks and implementation issues
• Implementing a successful “fast close” initiative
• Leading the change and overcoming resistance to change
• Ensuring a quick implementation period
• Getting everyone on board with the need to change