Implement Fast Close in your organization

How to implement fast close in your organization?

Anticipate the trend: daf-mag.fr indicates in various articles that the closing time for companies in France is higher than in English-speaking countries, and represents a major challenge. But also, at the same time, many decision-makers have only relative confidence in the accounting information that reaches them.

You must start by having a schedule of the tasks that make up the closing.

The retro planning method: It is common for the various deadlines that punctuate a closing to already exist. Listing them exhaustively will allow you to check the time available for certain cycles.

Break down silos: the tasks are more or less already known locally in the accounting entities, they must be listed and the list standardized to then determine in which context a task applies or does not apply.

Then, if the frequency of closings increases, we will quickly identify the irritants:

repetitive tasks
requests for information that are slow to come
inadequacy of your systems for certain treatments

This will lead you to question the problems of a human, technological or organizational process nature.

Virtuous circles: In parallel with improving efficiency in closing tasks, you must seek to improve the employee experience.

These tasks will be referenced in a centralized system accessible to all, in which the deadlines, expectations on the information to be provided, and the people concerned will be clearly defined. You will need the right tool to streamline this process, and ensure the support and cooperation of the stakeholders. Check whether the tool you are considering seems easy to use when it comes to deploying it across the organization.

centralized full web platform so that everyone sees the same thing at the same time. Internet access and a browser will allow you to eliminate technical problems that occur on workstations.
a task structuring that allows you to view global summaries of progress and to be able to go to more detailed levels to analyze a component.
an organization of closing monitoring that remains flexible and adaptive, trying to avoid it being too captive to an environment or a tool. Thus, for example, in the event of a change of accounting tool, closing monitoring must not be seriously slowed down.
assistance in identifying irritants and bottlenecks, which is part of the company’s continuous improvement process. The image and general credibility will be improved with faster task delivery and reduced latency.
assistance for people in charge of the task, for example by providing document templates, guides or reconciliation features.