CFOKnowledge has performed a survey to acquire information about the status of the closing process. These are some of their published results:

• On the question whether organizations could speed up their reporting process most of the responding organizations said that they would be capable of speeding up the process by 40%.
• On the question “why is it important to close faster?” 44% responded that there is more time for in depth analysis, 31% said that a lot of money was released from the reporting process, and 25% was very pleased with faster information.
• Slow closing was in 40% of the respondents caused by the many review layers, 35% by the level of requested details in the consolidation and there was a lot of time lost by analysis and error corrections.

The secret of organizations that have reduced the number of reporting days and increased their (internal) customer satisfaction: 86% used an automated process. See this presentation.

Conclusion
We hope that this post will motivate you to put Fast Close on the agenda for 2014, in case you can’t close in 5 days yet. If you are a controller or responsible for monthly and annual reporting and won’t put Fast Close on your agenda or consider to implement Fast Close, I would like to meet you!!