Close Acceleration
Overview
A faster close enables faster decisions. Acceleration comes from process design, not from asking people to work more weekends.
When to Use
- Close cycle exceeds target days
- Reporting is chronically late
- Team burnout around close
- Scaling volume without adding close time
Core Practices
- Shift work pre-close (soft close, early reconciliations)
- Standardize and automate recurring entries
- Apply materiality to focus effort
- Parallelize independent workstreams
- Remove bottlenecks in reviews and handoffs
- Measure close time by task to find drag
Principles
- Speed without accuracy is worthless
- Heroic closes hide process failure
- Systems and calendars beat last-minute compression
- Continuous improvement compounds month over month
Verification
- Close calendar has pre-close milestones
- Task-level time is visible for bottlenecks
- Accuracy metrics don’t degrade as speed improves