Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Real-Life Success Stories of Finance Teams
- LKQ Corporation
- Tyro
- Aspect Energy
- Summing Up: What Worked and What Did Not
- How Atidiv Could Transform Financial Close For You
- Financial Close FAQs
Financial close is one of those important finance and accounting processes that many businesses still struggle with. The point is not whether finance teams are competent enough to handle it; rather, it is that the close demands time, structure, and continuous upkeep. These things are difficult to maintain, considering your teams are juggling daily operations and urgent approvals, besides dealing with unexpected issues that keep popping up.
Introduction
Without dedicated focus on finance and accounting, bank reconciliations pile up, variances go unnoticed, and last-minute corrections turn the close into a stressful race. To deal with this issue, modern businesses are increasingly relying on automation for controlled, repeatable processes.
And the results are quite perspicuous.
Teams that once took 12–15 days to close their books have shortened their cycles to just 3–5 days. This seemingly miraculous act is achieved by automating journal entries and adopting continuous close practices, making the F&A operations an objective, predictable process. To corroborate this idea, this research claims that automation could cut close times by 70-80%.
Let us now focus on some real-life transformations that businesses have undergone in recent years in terms of reducing close times and making better-informed market decisions.
Real-Life Success Stories of Finance Teams
If you are struggling with financial close in the initial days of your business, you are not alone. It is common for businesses not to get things right at the beginning. How they take it up from there and turn things around, however, is pretty inspirational. Here are some real-life examples of businesses that have transformed their financial close processes successfully for remarkable business growth.
LKQ Corporation
LKQ is a Fortune-500 auto parts distributor with operations across continents. During its rapid growth through a heavy acquisition strategy, its finance team faced major challenges like
- inconsistent accounting processes,
- scattered spreadsheets,
- lack of visibility, and
- a cumbersome financial close cycle across dozens of business units.
To fix this, LKQ implemented:
- Automated cash- and balance-sheet reconciliations with the help of outsourced finance and accounting
- A standardized, global close process so that every accounting centre follows the same schedule.
- Risk-based reconciliation scheduling and real-time visibility into the status of thousands of accounts.
The results. Amazing.
LKQ managed to reduce its month-end financial close cycle by two days, from 9 days to 7. Furthermore, the automated reconciliation system made sure that a majority of entries were reconciled within a couple of days at the most. More importantly, they scaled without having to hire more employees, which you could treat as a masterclass in finance management!
Tyro
Tyro is a fast-growing fintech and one of Australia’s major payment processors. By 2021, it was handling over US $25.5 billion in transactions annually, yet its finance team remained compact. Pretty hard to believe, but only about 18 people managing reconciliation and close processes for the entire organization – that was the Tyro F&A set-up.
What went wrong?
With finance and accounting, the problems are not sudden. They usually start showing the symptoms for quite some time, and as part of the core business management team, it is your responsibility to spot them. Tyro had to manage about 120 spreadsheets per month – pretty doable – and they were handling the same all this time on simple spreadsheets. However, soon the discrepancies in numbers were too many to ignore, and the errors and delays in collaborations to glaring to look the other way.
Did they manage to solve it? Yes!
To address these challenges, Tyro shifted to outsourcing and automating their finance and accounting functions. The goals were simple:
- reduce manual effort to do away with human-induced errors,
- standardize and scale reconciliation for realistic financial insights,
- improve collaboration and governance for better market performance, and
- handle larger transaction volumes without expanding the finance team.
It worked. With automated systems, their finance team gained real-time dashboards summarizing how many reconciliations were pending, their status, and who they belonged to. Thus, they could better address issues as they had more clarity on the cause. Moreover, collaboration improved dramatically. Instead of waiting sequentially for master-sheet updates, multiple team members worked and reviewed simultaneously, thus cutting down process delays.
As Tyro continues to grow, the team is confident the system will handle increased volume without a proportional increase in headcount or manual workload. In 2025, you need to take a similar approach – opt for trusted U.S. accounting firms that can get the F&A job done for you so that you can solely focus on growth.
Aspect Energy
Aspect Energy is a global energy-investment firm its operations spanning across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South America. With such a geographically dispersed business and many entities, their finance team struggled to deliver timely month-end closes.
What went wrong?
The finance and accounting operations began showing signs of dated techniques and the requirement for an innovative leap. The global close cycle for the company, facing its worst phase, ranged between 15 and 45 days, causing delays in financial reporting and decision-making.
To address these challenges, the Aspect Energy leadership chose an F&A brand for its intuitive checklist-based close management. With easily configurable dashboards and straightforward implementation, the results began to show slowly but steadily. They were able to cut the global close cycle duration by 20 days!
You must be wondering what worked for the company. In short, these pointers made all the difference:
- Transitioning from manual spreadsheets to a dedicated close-management tool, gaining visibility and transparency in financial reports
- Automation of reconciliations and reminders reducing repetitive tasks and, by extension, human-introduced errors
- Real-time dashboards providing the leadership with quicker access to financial data, causing faster and better market decisions
- Standardized, repeatable process scaling well across multiple geographies and entities
Therefore, your business needs to pick a leaf out of this success story and begin your F&A automation journey for business growth in 2025.
Summing Up: What Worked and What Did Not
It is easy to get lost in the rabbit hole of what went wrong, with anxiety lurking around the corner, when you think – What if I am committing the same mistake? First of all, calm down. Here is a streamlined guide to understand what worked for each of the successful businesses.
| Company | What Worked |
| LKQ Corporation | Standardized its global close, automated cash and balance-sheet reconciliations, and used real-time visibility to monitor thousands of accounts. These changes reduced the financial close time from 9 days to 7 and allowed LKQ to scale without hiring more staff. |
| Tyro | Replaced 120 monthly spreadsheets with automated reconciliation and dashboards. Multi-user collaboration eliminated delays, improved accuracy, and helped the team handle high transaction volumes without increasing headcount. |
| Aspect Energy | Moved from manual checklists to a dedicated close-management tool. Automated reconciliations by using dashboards to standardized workflows cut the global close cycle by 20 days. Moreover, it improved accountability across global regions. |
So, what are you waiting for? Implement automated finance and accounting operations in your company today for the best results!
How Atidiv Could Transform Financial Close For You
A streamlined financial close is essential for confident decision-making, and Atidiv helps businesses achieve this with structure, accuracy, and expert oversight. With over 16 years of experience, Atidiv has been delivering with 100% precision every time.
Here is a brief view of what you stand to gain, should you choose to partner with us:
- End-to-end finance management: Handling of bookkeeping, AR/AP, payroll, and reconciliations, among other important functionalities, taking the operational burden off your internal team
- Scalable support: Continuous and simultaneous process scaling, without needing additional in-house headcount
- Rigorous quality control: A three-stage review process ensuring accurate ledgers, clean reconciliations, and error-free closing cycles
- Standardized workflows: consistent audit-ready processes that keep your books updated throughout the month
- Close-ready reporting: Tailored financial statements and dashboards giving you full visibility and control with regular reconciliations
Atidiv combines continuous bookkeeping with structured close management, enabling you to close faster and reduce manual stress. Call us today and book your free consultation!
Financial Close FAQs
1. Why is my month-end close taking so long?
Long close cycles are usually caused by
- manual reconciliations,
- scattered spreadsheets,
- inconsistent processes across departments, and
- last-minute data corrections.
When teams juggle daily operations alongside rigorous processes like reconciliation and close, variances slip through, and approval workflows slow everything down. Without automation and standardized checklists, even small delays compound and extend the close by several days, or in worst cases, weeks.
2. How can automation improve the financial close process?
Automation speeds up the close by eliminating repetitive manual work such as journal entries, reconciliations, and variance checks. It also provides real-time dashboards that clearly show the standardized workflows and built-in reminders on its interface, keeping the process consistent across teams and entities. With automated accuracy checks and faster data availability, finance leaders get clearer visibility and close cycles with fewer errors, thus shrinking the time taken from weeks to just a few days.
3. When should a business consider outsourcing its financial close?
A business should consider outsourcing when close delays are recurring, and internal teams are frequently stressed due to overwork. These are signs of error rates rising or the volume of transactions outgrowing existing systems. Outsourcing is also ideal when a company lacks automation tools or when scaling with more experts seems a big stretch on the budget. Worry not – a trusted F&A provider can combine automation with expert intervention to deliver a faster, more reliable close without the overhead of managing it internally.