Financial Close and Control Assistant
Secure and accelerate financial close with automated controls, targeted alerts, and smart checklists.
Two days before close, an accountant is still reconciling subledgers against the general ledger in a spreadsheet inherited from last quarter, chasing a gap nobody has explained yet.
We set up recurring controls that compare periods and update a checklist continuously, so the controller spends their time on the variations that actually matter.
The entry that doesn’t reconcile, found at 8pm
Two days before close, an accountant reconciles subledgers against the general ledger in a spreadsheet inherited from last quarter. A bank reconciliation gap has sat unexplained for three weeks, and it falls to them to trace it back before the controller signs off the period, reopening each statement from the quarter in turn to find where the amount originated.
An alert that cries wolf wears down vigilance
A first batch of automated rules, set wide to avoid missing anything, produces dozens of alerts on rounding differences or immaterial invoicing delays. After two closes, the team starts filtering the email instead of reading it, and the one alert that matters gets lost with the rest. The cause sits in the initial tuning: nobody took the time, before go-live, to say which gap actually deserves an alert.
A materiality threshold set in advance
The project holds up if the chart of accounts and reconciliation rules stay stable from one period to the next, and if a materiality threshold has been discussed and fixed upfront rather than left to individual judgement. Without that agreement, the system inherits the same disagreements as the manual close, only faster. A chart-of-accounts change mid-year, or a consolidation that reclassifies accounts, forces a review of the rules before they can be trusted again.
Who signs off close, and on what
We set up recurring controls that compare periods, detect out-of-threshold variations, and update a checklist continuously. The controller sees progress in real time and spends their time on the variations that matter. They alone remain authorised to validate the period; the system never posts or reverses an entry. Every flagged anomaly comes with its source data and the rule that triggered it, so checking it doesn’t mean reconstructing the reasoning from scratch.