Quick Month-end Reporting – by day 3 or less

How much time is your team wasting on month-end reporting?

Is your team one of the many who are sucked in by processes that have more in common with the Charles Dicken’s era that the 21st century?

When I was a corporate accountant each period end was a disaster waiting to happen. Each month-end had a life of its own. You never knew when and where the problems were to come from. Always two or three days away we appeared to have it under control, and yet, each month we were faxing (email was not on the scene then) the result, with our fingers crossed. The last minute adjustments having negated “quality assurance” work we performed earlier leaving the result exposed to a late error.

What you can gain from reading David's white paper

• Access to electronic versions of all templates
• Complete your month-end by three working days
• Identify the appropriate better practices to speed up month-end routines
• A step-by-step implementation work programme
• An ability to run an in-house workshop to “post-it” re-engineer month-end processes

Organisations around the world are spending far too much time on month-end reporting where the real decision based reports are those issued daily and weekly. In other words telling management the horse has bolted after month-end is too late. David Parmenter has presented this white paper successfully to audiences in Australia, Ireland, England and New Zealand to over 2,000 attendees. It has had a profound impact across all sectors.

If your month-end is slow this is a must read white paper. David states he has yet to find an organisation that cannot get down to day 3 reporting if they apply his methodology developed from the better practices of hundreds of fast reporting organisations. David will explain that month-end reporting by day one is being achieved by some leading organisations around the world. While day one reporting may not be a goal you wish to achieve, day three reporting may well be. Reading this paper will provide an impetus to shorten your month-end reporting process.

This white paper covers

• Review case studies on quick month-end reporting (day one and virtual closing)
• Practical steps to overcome the common bottlenecks of:
  • Accounts Payable close-off
  • Accruals
  • Budget holders’ variance analysis and commentary
  • Journals
  • Downloading GL reports to Excel
  • inter-company
  • writing the summary commentary etc.
• How to “post-it” re-engineer your month-end processes
• How to take the “Charles Dickens” processes out of Accounts payable, one of the main barriers to quick reporting
• The connection to decision based reporting and quarterly rolling forecasts

Table of Contents from "How to Implement Quick Month-end Reporting"

1. Introduction
2. What is day one reporting?
3. Benefits to management and the finance team
4. The impact of quick reporting on the finance team and the organisation
5. History of day one reporting
6. Case study 1: Johnson & Johnson vision products USA
7. Case study 2: a distributor and seller of alcoholic beverages
8. Case study 3: Motorola 12 non events a year
9. DOR in Australia based on a 1999 CPA study
10. The common bottlenecks in month end reporting and techniques to get around them
11. Letting go of report writing
12. Producing more useful information during the month
13. Closing accruals on Day 2
14. Implementing a DOR strategy
15. Suggested implementation plan
16. Day one workshop
17. Linkages to other leading management models
18. Quarterly Rolling Forecasting
19. Decision Based Reporting
20. Reporting Key Performance Indicators
21. Last words
22. Appendix 1: Checklist of implementation steps to reduce month-end reporting time frames.