The Fast Close: Achieving Quick Wins and Big Wins

Overview The "fast close," a concept used to describe a corporation's ability to complete its accounting cycles and close its books quickly, is re-emerging as an important project for today's global finance function.

For a brief period in the late 1990s, companies became more efficient at closing their books and reporting their financial information, but compliance regulations such as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 placed additional reporting rules on organizations worldwide.

What followed was a period of more methodical approaches to preparing numbers in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and statutory requirements, as many companies became reluctant to close their books quickly for fear of submitting inaccurate financial statements. In the United States, for example, close cycles have slowed down by an average of seven days during each of the past three years.

This white paper from SAP/Business Objects discusses how corporate finance centers can overcome the barriers to fast close by shifting processes such as intercompany reconciliation outside the close process and by automating traditionally manual consolidation functions such as foreign currency translation adjustments, minority interest and equity calculations, and automatic cash flows.