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by r00fus 2938 days ago
Sounds great - how would you lighten the burden without introducing further complexity?

3x more reports = more burden, right?

1 comments

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

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

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.
I believe the point r00fus is making is that a lot of these transactions require human intervention. Lots of situations require professional judgement -- accounting is not simply bookkeeping (for which yes, computers can carry the can).

Still, from an ignorant outsider's POV, it would be interesting to run towards the pain. My instinct is that smaller batch sizes are better overall.