In today's financial landscape, a quick and accurate month-end close is crucial for effective decision-making. Many teams face challenges with lengthy closing processes that hinder timely decisions. Imagine reducing your month-end closing time by over 50% while improving data accuracy—this transformation can significantly enhance your company's operations.
At Venn, we have streamlined our End-of-Month (EOM) close to just three days, boosting both speed and accuracy. In this post, you'll learn essential steps and methods to improve efficiency in your financial operations.
We are fortunate to partner with an awesome accounting firm that takes on a majority of our financial reconciliation, but there are important steps and responsibilities that only our team can complete. As is the case for many companies, we are the ones who best know our day-to-day processes and products. The five major categories that go into closing the books from our side are:
There are many other tasks involved in the EOM process, but those are the major categories.
Sounds like a lot of nitty gritty details and spinning plates, huh? Thankfully, we have the process nailed down so we don’t miss a thing amidst the busiest time of our month.
We often joke that if Asana were to go down, we’d just go home for the day. In reality, we rely on Asana, our project management software, to operate effectively and track necessary steps during the end-of-month close process. It helps us assign responsibilities clearly and ensures we complete tasks on time with recurring reminders. This way, everyone can plan, avoiding surprises or last-minute requests.
We have listed every EOM task, beginning with an actionable verb to help break down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable ones.
Additionally, we have estimated the time required for each task to ensure that no team member is overloaded on any given day. To anticipate challenges, we overestimate the time required for completion, giving us flexibility if unexpected issues arise.
Asana provides visibility into daily tasks, enabling team members to see what’s planned even when someone is on PTO or unexpectedly sick, allowing others to step in as needed. We include detailed instructions in the description of each task to help with this process.
We also rely on Slack for constant communication among our teams at Venn, which is essential for quickly gathering necessary information from our organization and partner accounting firm.
We ensure that our Asana is organized and up to date every day, so when busier weeks, like month-end, come along, our rhythms don’t change just because our workload does.
We open “My Tasks” in Asana, and start from the top of the list and work our way down. We also focus on one or two major categories every day, so we don’t try to do too much at once.
Besides that, very practically, we follow what Asana tells us to do. We are confident that our tasks are our preparation to avoid chaos. Each month, we follow the same routine and list everything ahead of time, eliminating the need to remember things in the moment.
If we were to start over, we would first conduct a thorough brain dump of every detail needed to close our books. We’d gather our team for an hour or two in a conference room with a whiteboard to outline everything. Afterward, we can ask questions like, “Is this the right person for the task?” “Should we keep doing this?” and “How often do we need to do it?”
To effectively manage our timeline, we consider the question, “How quickly does our team need to close the books?” By establishing clear due dates based on this determination, we can maintain consistency and ensure that the end-of-month (EOM) close is completed within our required timeframe.
The most organized team member can create a project in Asana (or any existing project management tool) to list each task with a single assignee, due date, and recurrence. We also have assignees document instructions in their tasks for future reference.
Try this for a couple of months! You’ll identify additional tasks to add, and as processes and people evolve, you can make adjustments easily since everything is in one place.
Reducing our month-end close to just three days hasn’t just saved us time—it’s improved our accuracy, confidence, and decision-making as a team. Streamlining these processes might seem daunting at first, but the payoff is worth it.
If you’re ready to simplify your financial operations and speed up your month-end close, we’re here to help. Let’s talk about how integrations and automation can transform your team’s workflows.