Close Cycle Rankings
The close cycle time is regarded by many Chief Financial Officers (CFO’s) and Finance Directors (FD’s) as a key benchmark. This is because there is wide acceptance in the finance community that the speed of close is symptomatic of the state of their underlying finance processes and systems. The hypothesis is that those who have the fastest close cycles will typically have the most effective and efficient finance processes. This is because they can close their ledgers at their global operations, can collect and consolidate data from those operations and can analyse and interpret that data more quickly than others. Finally they also have such confidence in the quality of the information that they are able to report it to their shareholders more quickly than others.
Because of the power of the metric we have seen many organisations launch “fast close”, “close acceleration” or “virtual close” initiatives over the last 10 years. These have resulted in significant improvements in their financial processes and systems as well as accelerated reporting timetables. We are proud to have been able to work on a number of these successful projects with our clients.
“You cannot underestimate the power of the fast close in driving performance improvement in the finance function” Controller, UK FTSE100 Plc
We therefore have been carrying out this research over a number of years to help provide our clients with better insights into the global trends and best practices in close cycle times.
