The monthly close has long been a badge of honor for accounting teams, a grueling but necessary process to ensure compliance and financial discipline. Yet, as businesses grow and data becomes increasingly dynamic, many teams are asking: Is there a better way?

For most organizations, the close has become a constant grind - an exhausting sprint of reconciliations, journal entries, and corrections repeated 12 times a year. And then there’s the pressure to do it even faster than the previous month. While a fully continuous or one-click close may still feel out of reach for many companies, there’s growing momentum to challenge the status quo. What if we didn’t have to wait weeks for critical insights? What if parts of the close could happen in real time, allowing teams to focus on value-added work rather than firefighting?

1. Why Do We Close 12 Times a Year?

The tradition of monthly closes originates from tax and regulatory reporting requirements, as well as the structure of key financial processes like bank reconciliations, payroll, and expense reporting, processes typically aligned with monthly cycles. Consolidating and recording transactions on a consistent, predictable schedule has long been considered the most efficient way to manage these tasks.

Another contributing factor is the timing of critical data availability. Revenue or expense details and accrual data, for instance, often become accessible only after the month-end. By relying on actuals instead of estimates, a monthly cadence feels safer and more accurate. However, this approach leaves teams waiting, delaying insights that could otherwise drive earlier decision-making.

Finally, there’s a systemic issue at play: a lack of incentives to push for change. While accounting teams remain entrenched in month-end activities, strategic finance, operational teams, and other stakeholders increasingly rely on dashboards and non-ERP tools to access real-time information. This disconnect between accounting workflows and broader business needs further perpetuates the issue and slows momentum toward exploring alternatives, such as continuous closing.

Prioritizing key financial areas can help address this challenge. Instead of waiting until month-end to close books entirely, teams can shift towards a rolling close model where critical metrics like revenue, cash flow, and expenses are continuously updated. This approach not only enhances real-time financial visibility but also enables more proactive decision-making. By focusing on high-impact areas first, finance teams can reduce the burden of the traditional close while still maintaining accuracy and compliance.

Tom Stenhouse, CFO at Nextgen Clearing, challenged this outdated approach:

“There’s no reason to wait until the end of the month to understand your financial position. For key areas like revenue and cash flow, a live view or rolling updates provide immense value. Waiting 20 days to address issues means you’re missing opportunities to course correct.”

Simone Rüschenberg, CFO at Taktile, shared with us:

“CEOs and leaders want to know the key financial metrics around revenues and expenses right now, not 15 or 20 days later. There’s much more pressure on finance to deliver real-time insights, and working in silos or closing books late simply isn’t viable anymore.”

2. What Could a Continuous Close Unlock?

The idea of a fully continuous close, a seamless, one-click process, may still be aspirational for most businesses. However, moving toward this vision doesn’t require an all-or-nothing approach. Instead of cramming all reconciliations and adjustments into a fixed period, they distribute the workload across the month. Incremental changes, such as building processes around specific areas, such as cash, revenues, or expenses on a continuous or weekly basis, can unlock substantial benefits without requiring a full overhaul.

This shift opens up new possibilities:

• Faster Insights into Key Metrics: Closing cash, revenue, or expenses on a rolling basis provides real-time visibility into critical financial areas. Provide a single source of truth rather than various stakeholders using multiple data sources.

• More Informed Decision-Making: Frequent updates enable leadership to act on trends as they emerge rather than waiting weeks for retrospective data on actuals.

• Reduced Stress and Bottlenecks: Breaking up the close process minimizes the last-minute crunch and creates room for thoughtful analysis.

Billy Morris, Experienced CFO, shared the following insights:

“Having more frequent financial checkpoints, whether daily, weekly, or biweekly, can help drive faster, more informed decision-making. However, implementing this approach depends on whether a company’s data infrastructure can support it. While the monthly close remains crucial, integrating more frequent financial insights can provide significant advantages.”

3. Steps to Transition

Transitioning from a traditional close to a more agile, streamlined process requires intentional changes in culture, tools, and workflows:

1. Embrace Automation: Automate routine tasks like reconciliations, journal entries, and variance analysis using cutting-edge tools that exist today. AI agents will soon take over these repetitive tasks and workflows.

2. Implement a Rolling Close: Identify parts of the close process that can be proactively closed. Either booked and reconciled continuously or on daily or weekly tasks to avoid end-of-month bottlenecks. 

3. Focus on Clean Data: Ensure that upstream processes, like AP, AR, payroll, and operating expense management, are efficient and accurate, minimizing downstream corrections.

4. Build Cross-Functional Alignment: Collaborate with operational teams to ensure data flows are consistent and timely.

Ruben Arnbert, CFO at Juni, shared:

 “The real value from a finance team is essentially two things: fast reporting to get results quickly and communicating those results and the actions the organization should take based on those results. Financial data, particularly in a startup, gets stale extremely quickly. The sooner you can tell the organization what is working and what isn’t, the more value you create.”

4. Opportunities Beyond the Close

Moving to a continuous close isn’t just about making processes faster - it’s about elevating the role of accounting teams and fundamentally transforming how they contribute to business success. By shifting to real-time reporting and more frequent updates, organizations unlock a range of strategic advantages:

• Timely Insights: Leadership gains access to fresh, actionable data when they need it most, enabling faster and more informed decision-making. Whether it’s understanding revenue trends or identifying expense anomalies, up-to-date insights provide a competitive edge.

• Improved Resource Allocation: With automation and smarter workflows, accounting teams can focus less on repetitive tasks like booking the expenses and more on guiding leadership based on the findings of those bookings, such as areas where savings can be realized.

• New projects beyond spreadsheets: Work with your budget holders to suggest savings in operational overhead with vendors, strategize with your tax team to unlock that newest tax saving or credit, or partner with sales to see where the cost of sales bloat is. Simply put, the potential to add new value is endless!

By embracing the principles of a continuous close, accounting teams can shed their traditional, back-office roles and take on a more proactive role with the business.

Wrapping up - the future of closing… 

Imagine a world where closing the books no longer feels like a sprint at the end of every month. Here at Stacks, our north star is a one-click close, but we know it won’t happen overnight. By embracing automation, adopting a continuous close, and redefining workflows, accounting teams can break free from the grind and unlock new levels of strategic impact.

As Tom Stenhouse put it,

“The concept of continuous close isn’t just about speeding things up - it’s about creating space to focus on what matters most: driving the business forward.”

The future of accounting lies beyond the close cycle - will your team be ready to leap?