What Does a 3 Day Close Look Like?

If your company is currently not accomplishing a 3-day close, this might be what your close looks like.

In a scenario when a company is taking all month (or longer) to close, the example below illustrates how long it takes to get each major section of the close completed.

Closing sales sometimes takes the shortest amount of time as long as the company keeps up with the process of invoicing daily or at least weekly. Accounts payable is often the big offender as far as time. If you’ve gotten into the habit of waiting on your vendors to send invoices in, and this holds up your close, keep reading this series to learn what to do instead! Once sales and accounts payable are completed, we can finally sit down to evaluate the accounts. This may involve detailed transactional review of accounts, information gathering, pulling of paper documents, and quite a few correcting journal entries to eliminate the wrong entries we have identified.

And finally, as is the habit with all long processes, we may rush through the final process just to get it done. Why? Because tomorrow we need to start the process of closing the next month end!

Think for just a minute about what this really means – the main activity our team is focusing on all month is closing the month! They aren’t getting to focus on analysis, continuous process improvement, or implementing necessary change they’ve already identified as needing to be done. Why? Because they are too busy. Doing what? Closing the month!

In contrast, this is what a 3-day close should look like.

Notice the significantly decreased amount of time on each area. This truly is a process of finalization. What that means is that there have been many changes and improvements done ahead of days one through three which make sure everything is ready to be made final in a very short period of time.

This is not easy to do, it can’t be done overnight, but it absolutely can be done. Keep reading the next posts in the series to discover how you can get to a month end that looks like this one.

How can New View Help?

The team at New View Strategies is made up of senior-level consultants with deep expertise in Dynamics 365 Business Central and NAV who have used the software themselves for an average of over 15 years. We understand the frustrations businesses have with understanding how to fit their business processes to how software works.  We've worked with many companies to fix their business processes and we can share with you what the winning solutions are easily.

Using our simple current state assessment, we can compare your processes against more successful practices we see used by other companies, make suggestions for training to help your team improve their skills, and tell you exactly how you can more fully utilize your software, increase process efficiency, reduce errors, and introduce automation using tools that already come with the base software.

Learn more about our current state assessment here, read our FAQ, or contact us today to talk about booking an assessment and learn how to be happier with the software you already own!