Accounting Efficiency: 7 Strategies for a Faster Close

The books closed in nine business days last month. On paper, that's acceptable. 

In reality, five of those days were spent chasing the same upstream data you chased the month before, rebuilding reconciliation workpapers from scratch, and fielding Slack messages asking, "Are the numbers ready yet?"

None of that is an accounting problem. The math works; the logic holds. It's a process problem. And it's costing your team days every single month.

This guide is about closing that gap — turning accounting from a reactive, spreadsheet-bound operation into one that closes faster, catches errors earlier, and frees up capacity for strategic work.

"You could build out any number of AI-native workflows in accounting, but if you haven't solved the fundamental — where are the data pipelines? What data is available? Is it accurate? Is there a single source of truth? — you won't be able to actually automate anything in earnest." 

Anthony Alvernaz, Co-Founder & CPO, Numeric 

Why Efficiency in Accounting Is Important

Efficiency in accounting is the optimization of how teams use time, technology, and workflows to close the books accurately and on schedule. But the definition doesn't stop at speed. 

For Controllers and CFOs, efficiency is a risk management requirement and a lever. Fewer manual touchpoints mean fewer errors, and cleaner processes determine how quickly leadership can act on financial data.

The common framing is 'do more with less.' But the bigger shift is freeing your team from repetitive close work so they can spend time on variance analysis, system improvements, and the business decisions that leadership actually needs from accounting.

The Strategic Upside of an Efficient Close

Every hour your team spends re-keying data between systems or rebuilding a flux report is an hour lost. That is time not spent on variance analysis that informs a pricing decision, or on a reconciliation review that catches a revenue recognition issue before it reaches the auditors.

The downstream effects are concrete: faster time-to-insight for FP&A (who can't start their work until you close), increased confidence in the numbers the CFO presents to the board, and stronger partnerships with business units.

As Adam Heeger, Solutions Manager at Numeric, puts it: "You want to be in a position where you can get ahead of it — know what business is going to be selling, what costs are going to be incurred — so you have the headspace to write the technical accounting memo or put the right data systems in place."

The Real Impact of Inefficiency

The tangible costs are well-documented: overtime, burnout-driven turnover, and post-close adjustments that erode audit confidence. But the opportunity costs are often larger.

When a team is perpetually in "close mode," there is no capacity for system implementation or the business understanding that prevents surprises.

Heeger describes this as "a recursive flywheel effect — if you're only ever closing the books, you're not ever improving your systems, and you're not going out talking to business partners. So you're always just playing catch-up."

Why Now? Data Volume and Complexity

Growth amplifies every inefficiency. A 12-entity, three-currency SaaS company faces fundamentally different challenges than a single-entity business. It’s more work and more interdependencies and more places for errors to hide.

Expectations from boards and investors are tightening. The tolerance for a ten-day close or manually prepared board decks is shrinking, especially for companies on an IPO trajectory. In this environment, AI and automation are necessary infrastructure for teams expected to deliver both speed and accuracy.

After implementing Numeric Sruthi Lanka, CFO of Public.com, has seen the payoff firsthand from having continuous accounting operations:

"The beauty of having finance operations that are up to date to the day is that any forecasting based on that is extraordinarily flexible. We can factor in pretty much any single scenario without too much incremental work."

1. Diagnose Inefficiencies in Your Accounting Function

Before redesigning anything, you need an honest picture of where time and errors concentrate. Intuition is often misleading.

Spot the Symptoms of an Inefficient Close

The symptoms are usually visible before you measure anything: close dates that shift by two or three days each month, heavy reliance on one person who "knows where everything is," and chronic last-minute reconciliations.

Visibility issues compound the problem. If leadership cannot see close status by entity without pinging someone, or if cash position requires manual assembly, you are operating with structural blind spots. Ask your team: Where do you spend the most time? Where do you feel least confident? The answers are rarely the same.

Note: Numeric helps teams to keep real-time visibility of their close status, with pacing charts and dashboarding for key metrics. To analyze the close for areas of improvement, teams can use Numeric’s AI Insights to ask for feedback on what’s lagging in their close.

Map Workflows End-to-End

Run a process mapping exercise for your core cycles: order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report. This doesn't require expensive consulting — a whiteboard and two hours with your team will surface 80% of what you need.

Focus on upstream dependencies. When does RevOps deliver booking data? When does HR confirm final headcount? These handoff points are where delays originate, often remaining invisible to the accounting team until explicitly mapped.

Establish Baseline Metrics

Start collecting baselines:

• Average business days to close.
• Number of balance sheet accounts reconciled monthly.
• Count of manual journal entries.
• Audit adjustments per quarter.

Roughly 50% of finance teams take six or more business days to close — and only 18% have achieved the three-day close that the industry talks about as the gold standard. If you are closing in nine days, targeting five within six months is aggressive but achievable.

2. Design Efficient Accounting Workflows

Process redesign is the foundation. Automating a broken workflow just produces broken outputs faster.

Standardize and Document Core Processes

Build clear SOPs for every recurring workflow: AP processing, revenue recognition, fixed assets, and accruals.

Heeger is candid about the limits of generic templates: "I hate when I have to give clients templates because I don't know your business. I can give you a super generic template and it'll say 'book AR and make accruals' — those are things all accountants have to do. But every business is a little different."

Granular documentation, specific to your chart of accounts and data sources is the only way to make SOPs useful for training and delegation.

Define Ownership, RACI, and SLAs

Define a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) for every major close process. Set realistic SLAs for upstream dependencies.

If expense reports are due by Business Day Three, document that date in your close calendar and communicate it. If Sales doesn't know their data submission deadline affects the close, they have no incentive to prioritize it.

Centralize Task Management

Relying on Excel checklists creates fragmentation. When a task is "done" in a spreadsheet, there is no timestamp, attachment, or approval record.

Purpose-built close management tools centralize tasks and dependencies. This is both an efficiency play (one place to check status) and a control play (every action is logged). For companies approaching SOX compliance, having this centralization is essential.

Use Numeric to Support Workflow Efficiency

Numeric's close checklist centralizes operations with accounting-specific workflows — tagging by entity or control, assigning prepares and reviewers, and logging every status change.

For a multi-entity SaaS company, that means as a Controller you can filter to a single entity's close status, see which tasks are overdue and who owns them, and review posted journal entries pulled directly from NetSuite. All without switching tabs or pinging someone on Slack.

Saved Views let each team member customize their view by entity, department, or control area, so a staff accountant working the revenue close sees only what's relevant to them.

Every comment, submission, and attachment is timestamped in an audit trail, which means when auditors arrive, they get read-only access to a complete record instead of a folder of screenshots."

3. Make Reconciliations Faster and More Reliable

Reconciliations are one of the highest-ROI areas for improvement. They are repetitive, data-intensive, and prone to error when done manually.

Use Risk-Based Reconciliation Policies

Not every account deserves the same attention. Segment your balance sheet by risk and materiality. High-volume, judgment-heavy accounts (cash, AP, intercompany) warrant daily or weekly reconciliation. Low-risk accounts can be reconciled quarterly.

Move Toward Continuous Accounting

The shift to continuous accounting de-risks the close. Weekly cash reconciliations and rolling intercompany true-ups spread the work, surfacing errors early rather than compressing "discovery work" into the final 48 hours of the month.

Automate Reconciliation Workflows

Automated tools should ingest GL data, compare balances, and flag unexplained differences. For high-volume accounts like cash, rules-based matching can handle the bulk of transactions, allowing accountants to focus on exceptions.

Use Numeric to Streamline Reconciliations

Numeric’s reconciliation product pulls trial balance and transaction data directly from the ERP, automatically comparing schedules against GL balances. 

For cash, Numeric connects to thousands of banks worldwide to pull in transaction data automatically, eliminating manual exports before matching even begins. Our software’s cash management automates over 90% of matching. Transaction Monitors flag anomalous entries in real time, ensuring data is clean before it ever hits the reconciliation workpaper.