Fast Close – Closing your Books faster every month and year-end
A Fast Close is for you if you could answer the following questions with “Yes”. Are you wasting time every month and year to close your companies books? Do you feel you have forgotten something in your financial closings?
Than a “Fast Close” might be the right thing for you to do.
But what is a “Fast Close”?
A “Fast Close” is a lean procedure by which you streamline your closing activities. It takes out the hassle of closing your books and gives you some more benefits.
On top of the above a Fast Close could even help other employees in your business to understand, why certain information is needed at a specific date every month.
From my own experience I could tell, that explaining someone why they have to deliver certain information or documents is a great eye opener for many people.
When everyone knows why information are needed it’s more likely that you get what you need on time.
Who could benefit from a Fast Close?
Actually every business could benefit from a Fast Close. But the benefit might be more visible in bigger companies.
However, even small companies will see many benefits of doing a Fast Close each month. Though a Fast Close is something really any and every business could do.
Even if you are the only person in your business, a Fast Close could make sense. It saves you time, even if you only prepare everything for an external accountant.
What are the benefits of Fast Closing your monthly and yearly Reporting?
There are so many benefits, but let’s take a look to a few here:
- avoid unnecessary work
- ensure everything needed is done
- save time to close the monthly and yearly Financial Books
- higher awareness in the company about financial / accounting issues
Let’s take a look to each of the above benefits in detail.
Avoid unnecessary work
It’s amazing to find out how many things are done in a business multiple times. The same information might be entered in different systems again and again. You can’t waste employee time better.
If you need to enter the same information into various systems the chance of wrong entries are great.
Ensure everything needed is done
If you have to do lot’s of stuff to close your books and get your financial reports done, you like to be sure you have done everything.
As you prepare yourself and others for the things to come while setting up the Fast Close procedures, you ensure every topic is covered.
But be prepared for surprises. That means even if you setup everything perfectly a last minute change could always happen.
Save time to close the monthly and yearly Financial Books
This is really a great benefit. When you have your Fast Close procedures in place everything starts to get quite fast.
In the past I saw business reporting and financial closings been done in such short time, that I sometimes needed to ask myself “Did I forgot something?”. The answer always was “No”.
Some examples:
For a medium sized company the monthly reporting was done in 1 1/2 day instead of spending 5 days on the closing.
Another bigger business needed more than half a year to prepare their Annual Financial Statements. Due to a Fast Close Project they had been able to reduce the time needed by several months.
And even small businesses benefit by a reduced time for preparing monthly and yearly Financial Statements.
Imaging to save 1 day of the working time for one employee per month is a 12-day saving every year. During these days the employee could do other work such as assisting you to improve your business strategy. And in case it’s you are again doing all the things, wouldn’t it be great to safe a day per month and do something different with it than keeping up with the numbers.
How to setup the procedure for a Fast Close?
That’s easy. I’ll show you how to do it in the second article: The Fast Close Procedure – A Simple How-To.
To get started right away, you only need to sign up for a free Membership account.
As a member, you could download a closing-schedule template for free. See you inside the member’s area.