"How many days should our month-end close take?" is the most-asked benchmark question in finance — and the most misleading one to answer with a single number. The honest answer: it depends on your size and complexity, but almost everyone has more room than they'd care to admit.
What good looks like
As a rough orientation for a group finance function:
| Close speed | Working days to report | Typical maturity |
|---|---|---|
| Leading | 1–3 days | Automated & controlled / optimised |
| Good | 4–5 days | System-supported, well run |
| Typical | 6–8 days | Templated, manual hand-offs |
| Slow | 9+ days | Spreadsheet-driven, manual consolidation |
Treat these as orientation, not a target to chase blindly. A three-day close that produces numbers no one trusts is worse than a five-day close that's right. Speed is a symptom of maturity, not the goal in itself.
Where the days actually go
When a close runs long, the time almost always sits in a predictable handful of places:
- Intercompany — mismatches found late, chased by email, reconciled by hand.
- Manual journals and accruals — prepared and re-keyed close to (or after) the deadline.
- Consolidation in spreadsheets — eliminations and currency done off-system, then re-checked.
- Reconciliations — performed after the period rather than continuously, so breaks surface at the worst time.
- Review and rework — late adjustments cascade, and the pack gets rebuilt more than once.
How to compress it (in order)
Compressing a close is a sequence, not a single project. Roughly:
- Fix the foundations — a standard close calendar with clear task ownership and certifications, before any tooling.
- Move work into the period — pre-close accruals, continuous reconciliations, hard cut-offs.
- Put the close on a workflow — live status, task certification and automated chasing instead of email.
- Automate consolidation — system-driven eliminations, intercompany matching and currency on live data.
- Shift to continuous close — once the above is stable, effort moves from producing the numbers to analysing them.
The cost of a slow close
A long close isn't just late numbers. It's senior people spending the first week of every month assembling rather than analysing, decisions made on stale data, and a standing overtime tax twelve times a year. Put a cost on those days and the business case for compressing the close usually pays for itself well inside a year — and, unlike the close itself, the saving turns up every month without being chased.
Common questions
How many days should a month-end close take?
As orientation for a group finance function: 1–3 working days is leading, 4–5 is good, 6–8 is typical, and 9 or more is slow. Speed is a symptom of process maturity rather than a target to chase on its own — an accurate five-day close beats a three-day close no one trusts.
Why does our month-end close take so long?
The time almost always sits in a predictable few places: intercompany mismatches chased by email, manual journals and accruals prepared late, consolidation done in spreadsheets, reconciliations performed after the period rather than continuously, and review rework as late adjustments cascade.
How do you speed up the month-end close?
In order: fix the foundations (standard calendar, clear ownership), move work into the period (pre-close accruals, continuous reconciliations), put the close on a workflow with live status, automate consolidation, then shift toward a continuous close. Tooling comes after the process is standardised, not before.