The finance manager of a wholesale business described her month-end like this: “The first week I’m waiting for people. The second week I’m arguing with them.” Fourteen days, every month, for a company doing about $40 million a year.
Six months after an ERPNext Consulting project started, the same team closed in three days. Nothing about their accounting knowledge changed. What changed was when information entered the system.
Where the fourteen days actually went
We tracked it for one full cycle, honestly, with a stopwatch mentality. Eight of the fourteen days were waiting: for a warehouse count, for three expense claims, for one supplier statement that never matched.
Two days were genuine reconciliation. Four days were rework, mostly fixing entries made in the wrong month or against the wrong cost centre because someone was in a hurry on the last day.
- Waiting for information: 8 days
- Rework and corrections: 4 days
- Real reconciliation and review: 2 days
The four changes that cut eleven days
- Cut-off moved to day one, not month-end. Stock counts and expense submissions had a deadline of the third working day. Miss it and it lands next month, no exceptions, no debate.
- Expenses approved weekly instead of monthly. Managers spend ten minutes a week instead of two hours on the last Friday.
- Supplier statements reconciled every week by one person for 30 minutes, so month-end has nothing to discover.
- Cost centres locked to a list of 22, down from 190 that had grown through years of good intentions.
Point four caused the loudest complaints and delivered the biggest time saving. When people can only choose from 22 codes, they stop guessing.
The day-three checklist the team now uses
By the close of day three, five things must be true: all stock adjustments posted, all supplier invoices entered, all expense claims approved, all bank lines matched, and the cost of sales reviewed against the previous three months.
If you want to test this in your own business, pick one month and have someone note, hour by hour, what the finance team is waiting for. Most managers guess the problem is speed. The notes usually show it’s patience.