# Close Acceleration

> Accelerate the financial close through pre-close work, automation, materiality focus, and parallelization — without sacrificing accuracy. Use when close takes too long, blocks reporting, or relies on unsustainable heroics.

- Skill: `itsual/close-acceleration` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add itsual/close-acceleration`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/itsual/close-acceleration/raw
- Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS)
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: itsual (https://skillmd.com/u/itsual)
- Updated: 2026-09-22
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/itsual/close-acceleration

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# 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