Streamlining the Month-End Closing Process
Miles Hutchinson is a CGMA and experienced businessman. He has been an auditor with PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Chief Financial Officer of a $1 billion real estate development company. Miles is a highly sought after professional speaker and consultant who has presented over 1000 seminars and training sessions on a myriad of business and financial topics, such as financial analysis and modeling, accounting matters, strategic planning, and compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. His clients include Abbott Labs, Citicorp, the FBI, GE, Pfizer, and the US Marine Corps.
We will share best practices for closing the books, performing period-end analysis, and producing financial reports within 2 days of the month-end. We will discuss the key reasons for closing and reporting delays and how to overcome these obstacles to improve your closing process and timeline. Every business needs timely reporting at month-end, quarter-end, and year-end. Publicly traded companies have proscribed reporting deadlines. Management needs to know how they are doing. Your bankers and creditors want to know what kind of credit risk you are; your investors want to know what kind of return they can expect from their investment; your customers want to know you have a viable business model. Financial reporting must be timely and accurate.
Areas Covered
- Outline the closing process to identify the common barriers to timely and efficient month-end closing
- Ensure a clean and timely cut-off of business activities at month-end
- Identify tactics for eliminating the barriers to a timely closing
- Evaluate each step in the closing process to determine the earliest possible moment where each one could be started/completed
- Discuss completing month-end accruals so as to prevent delays in the reporting timeline
- Leverage your banking relationships for a speedy closing
- Discover how to work more effectively with other departments (beyond your control) that provide closing information to ensure zero delays in your closing process
- Discuss automating report generation using Microsoft excel
- Discuss alternatives to Excel report generation for even faster delivery
After attending this workshop you will be able to:
- Identify specific ways you can adjust your closing process for faster report delivery
- Develop a specific plan for migrating from your current closing process to a best-in-class close
Bonus: Excel model for warehousing your monthly budget data and automating the monthly generation of the primary variance report with the current period month and year-to-date data!
Course Level - All Skill Levels
Who Should Attend
- Business Managers
- Compliance Managers
- Compliance Officers
- Information Reporting Officers
- Bank Managers
- Risk Managers
- Human Resource Managers
- Manufacturing
- Service Providers
- Government agencies
- NGOs
- Other
Why Should You Attend
Every business needs to know how it is doing financially and they need to know it fast. Business managers need to know how their activities are impacting the company's financials. The more time they receive their reports and the better the manager understands this information, the better equipped they are to make effective business decisions. Accounting must strive to respond to these needs while protecting the reliability of the reports produced. Attend this course to better understand how to improve the balance between these two goals. Join us to learn how to push through the obstacles to timely closing, report generation, and distribution.
-
$200.00
-
