By the time the close is painful, the cause is eleven months old. Nearly every slow year-end we are called into is slow for the same reason: transactions were recorded, but the reason for them was not.
What actually slows a close
It is rarely volume. It is the handful of entries nobody can explain. An unusual adjustment posted in April, a payment to a supplier with no matching document, an intercompany balance that two people remember differently. Each one becomes an afternoon of reconstruction, and reconstruction in December is done from memory.
The second cause is the reconciliation left undone. A bank or inventory account that has not been agreed since spring does not fail quietly; it fails at the worst moment, and the difference has to be chased through nine months of movement.
Habits that pay for themselves
- Write the reason on the entry. One line at the time of posting, naming why and on whose authority.
- Reconcile monthly and sign it off. Bank, receivables, payables, inventory. An unreconciled month should be visible as a gap, not discovered later.
- File the supporting document to the transaction. Not to a folder for the month. To the transaction.
- Resolve intercompany balances as they arise. They are never easier later.
Start in January
None of this is sophisticated, and none of it can be applied retroactively. The company that closes in three days is not better staffed than the one that takes three weeks. It has simply been doing small amounts of this work continuously since the start of the year.
If this December is already difficult, the useful response is not to work longer hours on it. It is to write down which items caused the delay, and fix those specific habits before the next cycle begins.