Strengthening Your Month-End Closing Process with Impero

Month-end closing. A process that all businesses and finance departments know. Arguably, one of the most important processes for a business as an accurate and timely financial report provides key information that helps businesses understand their performance. From small businesses to large businesses preparing month-end closing is tedious and tricky, but essential to support the future of your business as well as satisfy management, stakeholders, and internal and external auditors.

Month-end closing is a comprehensive and time-consuming period, and many people are involved with this process where bottlenecks may appear. Although it is done each month it still can cause an unbelievable amount of stress within the organization as financial reports must be prepared accurately and as fast as possible.

Interestingly, according to CFO.com, the average organization needs 6.4 calendar days to close out a month’s book with some organizations needing over 10 days.

Speeding up or changing the process can be difficult as any wrong step or wrong information reported can have significant consequences for your business. By choosing Impero, businesses like Maersk and Falck have been able to decrease time, cost, and efforts with tasks pertaining to month-end closing.

If you or your organization are finding yourselves using too much time and resources on completing your month-end closing, then perhaps it is time to find a platform that can help with the process. With the help of Impero, the month-end closing process can be easily automated, making it quick and stress-free.

Impero allows you to create and schedule tasks and controls to ensure your month-end closing activities are performed timely and accurately by the appropriate people. This allows your business to rest assured that all reporting is correct and focus on continuing to build trust with customers, auditors, and partners.

How Impero can help support your Month-End Closing process?

Challenges during Month-End

Impero functionality

Structured process with an overview of all the tasks and controls that need to be performed.

Easily create tasks and controls with relevant details and add to new or existing program pertaining to the month-end
Filter through programs for overview of control name, responsible, reviewer, status, etc.
Automated process with clear deadlines of who needs to complete the tasks and controls and by when

Clear deadlines and expectations of what needs to be done and by whom.

Assign responsible to tasks and controls with specific instructions to guide the assigned and secure standardized execution
Set deadlines automatically trigger the tasks and control on the correct business day. Reminder emails will be sent to the assignees when the time is right, and tasks are pending

Possibility for real-time monitoring on different levels of the organization both locally and globally.

Real-time status of control completion for faster and efficient decision making via the reporting dashboard
When a control has been completed it is logged in Impero automatically
Automatic send outs of reports to managers at all levels of the organization

Easily reassign tasks if bottlenecks appear in the form of illness, holiday, busyness, etc.

Easily assign tasks and controls if someone is sick or on vacation during the month-end closing process
Under the user management feature, managers can replace or remove users in charge of performing the tasks and controls. This can be a one-off replacement, or permanent

Documentation gathered and stored in one shared place reducing risk of errors and simplifying the process for auditors.

All documentation stored in one secure shared place making it easy to identify and address potential mistakes or errors
Auditors can also be granted a view access to Impero which significantly reduces the time and effort required to provide them with requested data and documentation

Simple way to support account reconciliation.

With the datasheet functionality in Impero, you can easily verify information presented in the balance sheet
Datasheets imported from Excel can be integrated into Impero controls so all important procedures can be accounted for and checked by various departments or employees

These Impero functionalities strengthen the month-end closing, reducing the risks of reporting wrong numbers, and speeding up the process while giving your business an easy and simple understanding of the workflow and status.

Instead of spending over 10 days on the process making sure you have completed all the tasks and controls to finalize your financial reports, your business will have the complete process and all the correct information in one platform and can use the valuable time saved on other important tasks that are also crucial to your business.

Learn more about how you can automate and strengthen your month-end closing process by watching this webinar with Impero experts or book a demo.