Your accounting team working late during month-end close usually signals deeper problems with your financial close cycle. Manual accounting tasks, fragmented systems and sequential workflows create bottlenecks that force your finance team into overtime. When reconciliation processes depend on spreadsheets, email approvals and hunting for data across multiple systems, you end up with accounting overtime that affects accuracy, morale and strategic work. This article explains what causes these financial closing delays and how you can fix them.
What Actually Happens During Month-end Close That Takes So Long?
The month-end close process involves completing and verifying all financial transactions for the period before you can produce accurate reports. Your team needs to create and post journal entries, reconcile accounts, process intercompany transactions, analyse variances and prepare reports for management. These tasks take so long because they pile up at month-end and depend on each other in ways that prevent parallel work.
The typical month-end close follows a sequential pattern that creates inevitable delays:
| Close Stage | Key Activities | Common Bottlenecks |
|---|---|---|
| Data Collection | Gathering transactions, accruals, adjustments from departments | Late submissions, incomplete information, multiple follow-ups |
| Journal Entries | Creating, reviewing and posting entries across systems | Manual data entry, approval delays, correction cycles |
| Reconciliations | Matching transactions, investigating discrepancies | Spreadsheet errors, system disconnects, documentation gaps |
| Intercompany Matching | Balancing transactions between entities | Timing differences, communication delays, mismatched data |
| Analysis & Reporting | Variance analysis, management reports, commentary | Rushed work due to time spent on previous stages |
Journal entries require data from various departments and systems. Your team collects information about accruals, prepayments, reclassifications and adjustments, then manually enters this data into your ERP system. Each entry needs review and approval before posting, which adds time when approvers are busy or unavailable.
Account reconciliations come next. Your finance team matches transactions between different systems, investigates discrepancies and documents their findings. When you manage multiple legal entities or use several ERP instances, this work multiplies. Each account needs a clear audit trail showing who reconciled it, when they did it and what issues they found.
The sequential nature of these tasks means delays compound. When journal entries take longer than expected, reconciliations start late. When reconciliations reveal problems, your team needs to create additional journal entries and start over. This creates a cycle where everyone works late to meet unmoveable reporting deadlines.
Why Do Manual Processes Cause So Much Overtime in Accounting?
Manual data entry, spreadsheet-based reconciliations, email approvals and disconnected systems create bottlenecks that force your accounting team to work late. These processes are slow, error-prone and lack the real-time visibility you need to spot problems early.
The main culprits behind accounting overtime include:
- Spreadsheet dependency: Your team downloads data from your ERP, copies it into Excel templates, applies formulas and manually checks results—each step introducing potential errors
- Email-based approvals: Requests sit in inboxes whilst deadlines approach, with no automated reminders or escalation to keep work moving
- System fragmentation: Logging into multiple platforms for transaction data, supporting documentation and previous period files consumes hours of productive time
- Human error multiplication: A typo in a spreadsheet formula or a journal entry posted to the wrong account forces your team to redo work and verify everything downstream
- Invisible bottlenecks: Without centralised visibility, you discover delayed tasks too late to address them during normal hours
Email-based approvals slow everything down. Your team prepares journal entries or reconciliations, emails them to approvers and waits for responses. Approvers might be in meetings, travelling or dealing with other priorities. Your team can't move forward until they get approval, which pushes work into evenings and weekends.
The lack of real-time visibility means you discover bottlenecks too late. Without a centralised view of close progress, you don't know which tasks are delayed, who needs help or what problems are blocking completion. By the time you realise certain reconciliations aren't done, you've lost the buffer time you needed to address issues during normal hours.
What Are the Hidden Costs When Your Finance Team Constantly Works Late?
The business impact of accounting overtime extends far beyond the direct cost of extra hours paid. Your finance team experiences burnout, makes more mistakes due to fatigue, has no time for strategic analysis and eventually leaves for better opportunities.
Employee burnout destroys productivity and morale. When your team works late every month-end, they become exhausted and disengaged. The stress of repeated overtime affects their health, relationships and job satisfaction. Burnt-out employees take more sick days, perform below their capability and stop contributing ideas for improvement.
Turnover in finance teams is expensive and disruptive. Recruiting, hiring and training replacements costs money. More importantly, you lose institutional knowledge about your processes, systems and business relationships. New team members need months to become fully productive, during which your experienced staff work even harder to cover the gaps.
Reduced accuracy from fatigue creates financial risks. Tired people make mistakes. When your team rushes through reconciliations at midnight, they miss discrepancies that should be investigated. These errors can lead to misstated financials, compliance issues and poor business decisions based on incorrect data.
Delayed strategic analysis means missed opportunities. Your finance team should spend time analysing trends, identifying cost savings and supporting business decisions. When they're stuck doing manual data entry and reconciliations, this valuable work doesn't happen. Management lacks the insights they need to respond quickly to market changes or competitive threats.
Your ability to close faster puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Companies that complete their financial close in days rather than weeks can make decisions faster, respond to market changes more quickly and provide better guidance to investors. When your team is always working late just to meet basic deadlines, you can't compete with organisations that have modernised their close process.
How Can You Reduce Accounting Overtime and Speed Up the Close Process?
Reducing accounting overtime requires standardising workflows, automating routine tasks, improving system integration and creating better visibility across your close process. The goal is transforming your financial close from a monthly crisis into a controlled, predictable process.
Implement these strategies to eliminate unnecessary overtime:
- Standardise workflows across all entities by documenting exactly how each close task should be performed, who is responsible and what approval is needed
- Adopt continuous close practices by reconciling certain accounts weekly, preparing standard journal entries in advance and reviewing variances throughout the month
- Automate repetitive manual tasks so journal entries generate automatically from source data and reconciliations match transactions without manual intervention
- Improve system integration so data flows automatically between your close platform and ERP without file exports, uploads or manual transfers
- Establish clear accountability with centralised visibility showing which tasks are owned by whom, when they're due and what's blocking completion
Improve integration between your systems. When your close platform connects directly to your ERP, data flows automatically without file exports, uploads or manual transfers. Real-time integration means your team always works with current data and doesn't waste time on data preparation.
Create better documentation and audit trails. When your processes and decisions are documented automatically, your team spends less time preparing for audits and more time on productive work. Clear audit trails also make it easier to investigate issues without involving multiple people.
How We Help Reduce Accounting Overtime
We provide a financial close automation platform that addresses the root causes of accounting overtime. Our solution helps your team complete the close process faster and more accurately whilst working normal hours instead of late nights and weekends.
Our platform transforms your financial close through:
- Centralised task management that gives you complete visibility of close progress across all entities, showing exactly what's done, what's in progress and what's blocking completion
- Automated journal entries that generate, validate and post recurring entries without manual data entry, reducing errors and freeing your team for analytical work
- Streamlined reconciliations with automated matching, clear workflows and one-click approvals that eliminate spreadsheet-based processes
- Real-time monitoring through Account Monitor and Variance Monitor that flag anomalies immediately so your team can address issues before they delay the close
- Live ERP integration with SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics 365 that streams data automatically without file transfers or IT support
Finance teams using our platform reduce their close time by half or more whilst eliminating the overtime that was previously required. Your team gains control over the close process, works more efficiently and focuses on strategic activities that drive business value.
Ready to transform month-end chaos into just another week? Book a demonstration to see how our platform helps finance teams like yours achieve faster closes without the late nights.