Day 22. Your board meeting is tomorrow. Finance is still reconciling October.
Day 25. You finally see the numbers. The margin erosion started six weeks ago. You're just now finding out.Day 28. You make a hiring decision based on financials that are already a month old. By the time you realize the mistake, it's Day 50.
This is what a 20-day close actually costs. Not just time. Decisions made blind. Problems discovered late. Cash surprises that were visible three weeks ago—if anyone had been looking.
Your close isn't slow because your team is slow.
It's slow because you're cleaning and closing simultaneously. Month-end becomes a data cleanup project. Miscoded transactions discovered on day 15. Bank reconciliations that should've happened daily crammed into a weekend. That vendor invoice from three weeks ago that nobody entered.
The close is a symptom. The disease is everything that didn't happen the other 28 days.
I could give you the standard playbook: automate bank feeds, implement daily reconciliation, parallelize your close tasks. It's all true. It's all necessary.
But here's what nobody tells you: the 10-day close isn't a finance project. It's a company-wide behavior change.
Your ops team has to code expenses daily, not whenever they get around to it.
Your sales team has to submit deal documentation on close, not "sometime this week."
Your AP person has to process invoices as they arrive, not batch them for month-end.
The technology is the easy part. Getting humans to do things daily instead of monthly is the hard part.
Daily bank reconciliation. Fifteen minutes every morning. When month-end hits, you're reconciling one day's transactions, not thirty days' worth.
Weekly sub-ledger reviews. AR, AP, inventory—checked weekly, not discovered monthly. Problems surface in days, not quarters.
Exception-based review. Stop reviewing everything. Build thresholds. Flag anomalies. Review the 8% that's weird, not the 92% that's routine.
None of this is complicated. All of it requires discipline.
Month 1 is ugly. You're documenting your actual process—not the one in your procedures manual, the real one with all the workarounds and "we've always done it this way." Most companies find 40% of their close tasks are either redundant, missequenced, or shouldn't be month-end tasks at all.
Month 2 is construction. Connecting systems. Building automation. Implementing daily rhythms. Your team will resist. They'll say it's more work. They're wrong—it's different work, distributed across the month instead of crammed into a week.
Month 3 is compression. You run parallel closes—old process and new—until the new one proves itself. By day 90, the 10-day close isn't a goal. It's just how you operate.
The first month you close in 10 days, something shifts.
Your controller stops being a transaction processor and starts being an advisor. Your board meetings stop being fire drills. Cash surprises become cash predictions—you see problems forming weeks before they hit.
And you stop making decisions with last month's data. By day 10, you know exactly where you stand. The rest of the month is forward-looking.
That's the point. Not closing faster for its own sake. Closing faster so you can finally lead with current information instead of historical artifacts.
The 10-day close is the core of Foundation Rhythm—the first of three rhythms in the Financial Rhythm System.
It solves what we call Getting Ambushed. The cash surprises. The margin erosion nobody saw. The "how did we miss this" moments that keep CEOs up at night.
Without it, you're always reacting. With it, you're finally seeing.
Planning Rhythm creates foresight. Intelligence Rhythm creates decision speed. But neither works without the foundation.
Answer honestly:
When did you close last month? If it was after day 15, you're making decisions with stale data.
Does your team dread month-end? That dread is a signal. The process is broken.
Can you answer your board's questions same-day? Or do you need "a few days to pull the numbers"?
If any of these hit, the problem isn't your people. It's your rhythm.
Find Your Financial Rhythm →
Related: The Blank Stare Problem