The 10-Year Shortcut: Five Lessons on Closing Faster and Reporting with Confidence
Ricard Ribatallada here, CTO at Propriety Group, hopefully back with something worth ten minutes of your time: a decade of lessons on closing faster and reporting with confidence, drawn from watching finance teams do this work under real conditions.
Finance teams have more tools than ever. Cloud platforms, AI copilots, real-time dashboards, automated workflows: a modern finance function has access to a stack that would have looked like science fiction ten years ago. And yet, for many teams, the close still takes weeks. Reports still get built by hand. Budgets still live across a dozen disconnected spreadsheets, each with its own version of the truth.
More tools, same slow close. It's a lesson problem. Markets shift overnight, costs move unpredictably, and every week brings another request for a new forecast or a new scenario, due tomorrow. Traditional planning processes were built for a slower, more predictable time. They can't keep up with that rhythm.
Watch enough finance teams try to close faster and report with more confidence under those conditions, and the same five lessons surface again and again, whether the company has two hundred employees or twenty thousand. Call it a decade of planning knowledge, compressed into five hard-won truths.
The ambition hasn't changed. Finance teams have wanted to close faster and report with more confidence for as long as anyone can remember. What's changed is the gap between wanting to and actually doing it. AI has taken over the mechanical parts of the job: the data-wrangling, the reconciling, the rebuilding of the same model for the fourth time this quarter. These lessons were true ten years ago. They're finally achievable now.
Spreadsheets don't scale, they multiply risk
Every finance leader has learned this one the hard way. A single spreadsheet is fine. Ten spreadsheets, each maintained by a different person, each pulling from a different source, each on its own version: that's a liability waiting for the wrong week to surface.
The real problem is an entire planning cycle depending on dozens of spreadsheets staying in sync. One formula error, one outdated file emailed the day before a deadline, one team using last quarter's assumptions by accident, and the numbers stop agreeing with each other. Twenty minutes of analysis becomes two days of reconciliation, chasing down which version is right before anyone can even ask what the numbers mean for the business.
This gets harder in volatile periods, exactly when finance is asked to move quickest. A scenario request that should take an afternoon takes a week instead. Half of that week goes into rebuilding a spreadsheet model never designed to be touched twice in the same month, let alone daily. This is the fragmentation problem that pushes finance teams toward a unified data model: one place where planning, consolidation and reporting pull from the same source, so “which number is right?” stops being a daily question.
Swissbit AG felt this directly. By moving to automated, connected workflows for consolidation and budgeting, the company accelerated its monthly close and supported scalable growth without adding headcount just to manage the process. The lesson is “stop asking spreadsheets to do a database's job.” Reconciliation feels like careful, responsible work while it's happening. It's only afterwards, once you total the hours spent confirming numbers that should never have disagreed in the first place, that it's clearly a cost with no upside.
Speed without trust is worthless
This one trips up teams who assume the answer to a slow close is simply moving faster. If a report goes out three days earlier and nobody on the leadership team believes the number, nothing has actually been saved. The argument has just moved earlier in the calendar.
Trust doesn't come from speed. It comes from every team working from the same connected version of the truth: the same assumptions, the same exchange rates, the same definition of “revenue,” updated in one place and reflected everywhere at once. Plan-to-actual variance, the gap between what finance predicted and what happened, has to be accurate. It also has to be clear to people outside finance. A number only the finance team can explain has been translated, and translation takes time nobody has.
When BNP Paribas Real Estate UK overhauled its finance operations, the headline was full end-to-end visibility, the kind that lets a CFO stand behind a number in a boardroom with no caveat attached. That is what “report with confidence” means in practice: reporting in a way nobody feels the need to quietly double-check afterwards.
Independent recognition matters here too. Wolters Kluwer being named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Financial Close and Consolidation Solutions reflects the market's own view of which platforms deliver a trustworthy, connected close, not merely a quicker one.
Prediction beats reaction
This is where the last few years of AI adoption have genuinely changed the job, not just the tools used to do it. For most of the last decade, FP&A's core skill was explaining the past: here's what happened last quarter, and here's why. That's still necessary work. It's just no longer where the value sits.
The finance teams pulling ahead treat every close as a forecasting exercise, not a historical record. Instead of waiting until quarter-end to discover a plan has drifted off track, they run driver-based scenarios continuously, adjusting for a cost spike or a demand shift within days rather than months. That takes objective, AI-driven data management underneath the planning process, so the numbers feeding every scenario are current and complete, not a snapshot from three weeks ago.
Members 1st Federal Credit Union shows what this looks like in practice. Using predictive analytics and AI-driven planning, the credit union boosted its budgeting efficiency by 27%, freeing up time that used to disappear into building and rebuilding models by hand. JTEKT Corporation tells a similar story from a different industry, centralising budgeting, forecasting and investment management to make strategic decisions quicker and more accurately. Scenario modelling that used to take days (pulling data, rebuilding formulas, waiting for someone to check the maths) now takes minutes. AI does the mechanical work. The finance team does the thinking.
“Spreadsheets do not scale. They multiply risk.”
Want to see how your finance function measures up?
Our free assessment helps you take a closer look at the processes behind your close, planning and reporting, from how connected your data is to where manual work, reconciliation or governance gaps may be slowing you down.
Take the assessment:
https://scorecard.proprietygroup.com/closerfastandreportscorecard
Governance is what makes speed safe
This is the one most conversations about moving faster overlook, and it may be the most important of the five. Every finance leader carries a version of the same nightmare: a rushed figure that went out wrong, a control gap nobody noticed until the auditors did, a process so informal that nobody could reconstruct how a number was calculated six months later.
The instinct when something goes wrong is to slow everything down and add more sign-offs. That treats governance and speed as opposites. They aren't. A well-designed process workflow, with built-in checkpoints, a clear owner for every step, and an audit trail that updates automatically as the work happens, is what lets a team move quickly without anyone stopping to ask “but is this right?” at every step. This matters for the people doing the work as much as for the auditors checking it afterwards: a guided, wizard-based process with clear ownership means less time spent working out what to do next, and more time spent doing it.
The audit trail is the reason a team can trust the number it just closed quicker than before. This is easy to underestimate until it's missing. The teams with the strongest governance are, counterintuitively, the ones who can afford to move fastest. Speed without a safety net eventually produces an error expensive enough to undo every hour it saved. Governance built in from the start also compounds in the team's favour over time. Every close that follows the same auditable process makes the next one easier to defend, the next audit shorter, and the next new hire quicker to train. The process no longer lives in one person's head.
The finish line moved
This lesson changes how a finance team should think about its own purpose. A decade ago, closing the books was the destination, the thing the whole month built toward, the moment everyone could finally exhale. Today, for the teams doing this well, closing the books is the starting line.
The close used to answer one question: what happened? Now, the same connected data that speeds up the close also becomes the best input for the next question: what happens next? A finance function that closes in days instead of weeks is more than efficient on paper: it has time left in the month to actually plan, rather than simply report. That extra time also lets finance step into a more strategic role: fewer hours spent explaining last month, more hours spent shaping the next one, and a stronger position from which to plan for genuine uncertainty, not just the scenarios that were easy to model.
That's the real prize: a finance team that spends less time reconciling the past and more time shaping what the business does next. It's also what a genuine seat at the leadership table looks like: being in the room early enough to shape the decision the number was going to inform anyway, not being invited in only to explain it after the fact. Future-proofing financial leadership isn't about predicting every scenario correctly (nobody can do that). It's about having enough time back in the calendar to plan for the ones nobody saw coming.
Closing thought
None of these five lessons are really about software. They're about what finance teams have learned, often the hard way, about what it takes to close faster and report with confidence: connected data instead of scattered spreadsheets, trust instead of merely speed, prediction instead of reaction, governance instead of guesswork, and a finish line that keeps moving forward instead of repeating itself every month.
A decade of watching finance teams close the books taught us these lessons one at a time, usually the hard way. The shortcut is simply not having to learn them that way yourself.
Close faster. Report with confidence. It sounds like a slogan, but underneath it is a simple idea: the close and the plan should never have been treated as separate jobs. They're two views of the same connected number. The moment a finance team stops treating them as a relay race, close first, then hand off to planning, is the moment both start moving at the speed the business actually needs.
Want to see how your finance function measures up?
Our free assessment helps you take a closer look at the processes behind your close, planning and reporting, from how connected your data is to where manual work, reconciliation or governance gaps may be slowing you down.
It only takes a few minutes and gives you a clearer picture of where you are today and where to focus next.
Take the assessment: https://scorecard.proprietygroup.com/closerfastandreportscorecard