[DreamSpinner]

What I'd rather see is monthly "lightly audited" financials. This would provide a lot of benefits around transparency, reduce the incentive for quarterly and annual "cramming / forward entry" of sales, and provide for more of a "continuous audit" for the various accounting firms - reducing the size of the end-of-year rush (since most audit activity should already have been completed) and making it harder for companies to fudge their figures.

[stretchwithme]

What if you released raw numbers every month or constantly? How many cars sold, cash in the bank. Any number that would not help your competition. And that require no preparation.

[nradov]

Right with modern continuously closed accounting systems there's no reason this couldn't be done. Inertia and tradition are the only reason for releasing financial statements on a quarterly basis instead of more frequently.

[r00fus]

Sounds great - how would you lighten the burden without introducing further complexity?

3x more reports = more burden, right?

[colechristensen]

Industry standards and standard tools? We have computers for doing lots of hard things now.

[wtvanhest]

You would need to increase FP&A HC to cover the workload of explaining numbers throughout the org.

Closing the books at large companies still takes time and manual effort as well.

[nradov]

Closing the books is an anachronism left over from paper accounting. With modern automated accounting the books can be kept continuously closed.

[r00fus]

Do you work on corporate finance? Because constantly running such reports is not free. Can't just handwave away the nontrivial administrative overhead.

Heres a snapshot - monthly financial closes often require forward or reverse accounting so things are properly budgeted and balanced.

A trial balance report is easy to run, but then the numbers have to be reviewed & approved and discrepancies resolved.

[nradov]

Running automated reports is essentially free. With a properly designed accounting system it becomes impossible to create discrepancies in the first place. This requires a paradigm shift akin to doing software development with full continuous delivery (100% automation of the build / test / release) cycle but some forward thinking companies have done it successfully.