Executive Summary

SEC.01

The Directive

Month-end close was running 17 business days. Investors asked for a financial update on the 5th. The CFO of record was the founder. Every month required two weekends of catch-up.

Close · Before
17 d
Close · After
5 d

Forensic Breakdown

SEC.02
search

Phase 01 · Discovery

Tracked every step of the close. Found 11 manual handoffs, 6 of which had no owner. Two were waiting on a single Slack DM that nobody had thought to formalize.

analytics

Phase 02 · Quantification

Mapped each handoff to a day. The close wasn't slow because of any single bottleneck — it was slow because every step waited for the previous step's email reply.

build

Phase 03 · Resolution

Rewrote the close as a checklist with named owners and SLAs. Killed two unnecessary handoffs entirely. Bookkeeper now closes by day 5 without a single Slack escalation.

Outcomes

SEC.03
01

Close in 5 Days

Down from 17. Investor update lands on time, every month.

02

Owners Named

Every step has a name and a deadline. No more orphaned handoffs.

03

No New Tools

Same QuickBooks, same Stripe, same bookkeeper. Just better wired.

04

Founder Weekends Back

Zero month-end weekend work since the rebuild.

Action_Req

Want your close in 5 days?

Two hours of your time. Two weeks to a real plan.