Still taking over a week to close your books?

Johan Smith

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A recent article from CFO.com revealed something that might sound familiar: 50% of finance teams take week or more to close their books, and nearly 94% of finance teams still rely on Excel for their month-end close. That statistic alone says a lot.

The “3-day-close” remains more buzzword than real-world benchmark, with inefficiencies around Excel use and data quality slowing the process down.

Excel is trusted, familiar, flexible. But it's also one of the biggest reasons why so many finance teams are still taking a week or more to close the books each month.

Let's be honest: you can't speed up the process if your foundation is fragile. And spreadsheets, for all their strengths, are notoriously fragile.

The Month-End Maze

Closing the books is repetitive and should be a predictable and streamlined process. But for many teams, it still looks like this:

It's manual, it's error-prone, tedious, and it's painfully slow. But more than that, it creates a false sense of control.

Finance professionals often feel like they're on top of things because they built the formulas themselves. But that's part of the problem: the knowledge is trapped in those spreadsheets, and risks and errors are often hidden beneath the surface.

The irony? The longer you stick with Excel for complex processes, the more it slows you down.

Why Excel Is Slowing You Down

Here's what Excel does well: one-off analysis, quick calculations, ad hoc reports. It's a fantastic personal productivity tool. But here is what it's NOT built for:

• Process-driven work
• Controlled workflows and collaboration
• Real-time data integration
• Role-based access
• Audit trails
• Integrated consolidation
• Source-to-report transparency

Trying to use Excel as the foundation of your month-end close process is like using duct tape to hold together a moving car. It might work, until it doesn't.

Often it might feel easier to “just do it in Excel”. But it's exactly that shortcut mindset that leads to slow, unreliable month-end closes. In the end, you're not saving time, you're continuously recycling inefficiencies.

Remove the Friction

If you really want to shorten your month-end close, it's not about working faster. It's about removing recurring friction. Meaning issues and streneous tasks that you have to solve and repeat every single month. Over and over again.

That friction usually lives in the manual handoffs, the copied and re-entered data, the file version chaos, and the logic buried in cell formulas. All of that slows you down and increases the risk of errors.

The solution? Shift to structured, connected systems that let you:

• Automate data imports and validations
• Use consistent logic across all reports
• Create workflows that reflect your processes
• Give team members access to only what they need
• Audit, trace, and explain every number

In short: rely less on Excel, and more on systems built for the job.

Replace Fragility with Structure

It's not just about speed. It's about trust.

Spreadsheets are silent saboteurs. A small formula error, a broken link, a hidden override. These things slip through the cracks all the time. And the more complex your workbooks get, the harder they are to audit and fix.

Real data confidence comes from systems that surface problems early, enforce consistency, and make it easy to collaborate without corrupting the numbers.

That's why at XLReporting, we focus on helping finance teams move beyond Excel, not to replace its flexibility, but to remove its fragility. We give teams a structured, user-friendly platform where reporting, forecasting, and closing can all happen transparently and reliably.

Closing Thoughts

Granted, Excel got you this far. But it's not the tool that's going to take you to the next level.

As long as you're copy-pasting from system exports, building fragile workbooks, fixing issues, and working out which version is final, your month-end close will always take too long, and give you too much headache and doubt.

If you want to close faster and with more confidence, it's time to reduce your dependency on Excel.

You don't have to abandon Excel. Use it for what it is good at. But you do have to stop pretending it's still the best tool for every job.

Do you want to explore how XLReporting can help you? Request a demo today! Click here

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Still taking over a week to close your books?

More from Johan Smith:

Forecasting Income in the Healthcare Sector
Forecasting Income for Non-Profit
The Top 5 Pitfalls in Budgeting
If You Break It, You Own It
When Control Becomes a Constraint

Back to the list