Cutting Monthly Close Time From Nine Days to Under Thirty Hours
A decade-old, largely manual reconciliation process had become the single biggest bottleneck in a multinational retailer's monthly close, consuming nine days across 14 markets and leaving treasury teams little time for anything but catching up. In 2025, an automated treasury pipeline replaced that process end to end, compressing close time to under thirty hours.
The Challenge
Reconciliation across 14 markets ran through spreadsheets and market-specific manual processes, each with its own quirks and failure points. Every month-end close consumed nine days of treasury staff time, delaying downstream reporting and leaving little room to investigate discrepancies properly.
Our Approach
- Replaced spreadsheet-based reconciliation with an automated pipeline standardized across all 14 markets.
- Built exception-based review so treasury staff only investigated genuine discrepancies, not routine matches.
- Integrated the pipeline directly with each market's banking and ERP feeds to eliminate manual data entry.
Key Results
- Monthly close time cut from nine days to under thirty hours.
- Reconciliation standardized and automated across all 14 markets.
- Treasury staff time redirected from manual matching to genuine exception handling.
With close time no longer the constraint, treasury leadership has shifted its focus to forward-looking cash forecasting, work the team never previously had the bandwidth to prioritize.
