Financial close automation that gives you your week back.

Anatomy of an automated close

Day one, the pipeline pulls bank feeds, subledgers, and the GL, and runs the matching. High-confidence matches clear automatically. Exceptions land in a queue with the model's reasoning and links to the underlying entries. Your accountant works the queue instead of building the reconciliation.

By the time the team starts the close, the reconciliations are largely done, accrual schedules are rolled forward, and the flux file is populated with drafted commentary: what moved, by how much, and the likely driver pulled from the ledger detail. The controller edits and signs. The mechanical week becomes a review day.

One production build we ship auto-matches 80 percent of incoming payments using two independent models that must agree, with exact-to-the-cent ties and a human queue for disagreements. That double-check pattern is what makes finance automation trustworthy enough to actually use.

What financial close automation consulting covers, week by week

Most financial close automation consulting stops at the assessment. You get a maturity model, a list of candidate processes, a vendor shortlist, and a business case that someone in finance then has to go and implement with a systems integrator. We work the other way around. The engagement produces a running close, and the assessment is only the part that decides what runs first.

Week one is measurement, not strategy. We sit with the controller and the staff accountants through an actual close and time it: which reconciliations take the longest, where the exceptions cluster, which schedules get rebuilt from scratch every month, and which day of the cycle the team loses to chasing other people. Each candidate gets an hours-per-month number and an error-exposure number, and we rank by payback. Some candidates get ruled out here because the input data is too inconsistent to automate honestly, and hearing that in week one is cheaper than hearing it in month four.

Weeks two through six are the build, and on a finance system the verification layer gets built alongside the feature rather than after it. Matched transactions carry a link back to the source entry. Any computed figure gets re-derived by a second independent pass, and a disagreement blocks with a flag instead of publishing a number nobody checked. Postings and outbound messages stay behind human approval until measured error rates earn otherwise.

Handover is the part worth pinning down with any consultant you talk to. You get the repository, the prompts, the evaluation set, and a working session with whoever will own it after we leave. A controller who has to rent their own close process back from an adviser every year has bought the wrong thing.

The honest limit is that this works where the close is mechanical and the before state is measurable in hours. It does not solve judgment calls such as whether an accrual estimate is reasonable or whether a variance needs disclosure. If your close is slow because of judgment and review rather than assembly, we will say so on the first call.

Start with the free stack

The month-end close kill sheet, the consolidation pack, and the fund NAV close pack in our public library are free, runnable versions of what we build for clients. They run on your own Claude account against your own exports, today, without talking to us.

If the free version proves the pattern on one entity, the engagement is production plumbing: live feeds instead of exports, your chart of accounts, approval routing, and audit logging. Fixed scope, priced before we start.