The month-end close went from nine days to four
Eleven entities, three currencies, and a 340-tab workbook that one person understood. This is the whole story, including the six weeks where our software was worse than the spreadsheet it replaced.
I would not describe the first two months as a success. What saved it was that they gave me the rule editor instead of asking me to file tickets — I knew why the data was weird and they never could have.
What actually happened, in order
Three acts, and the second one is the reason the third is believable.
Before
Four people, two days, every month, forever
Meridian ran eleven entities across three currencies, and the close ran on a shared workbook with 340 tabs that one person understood. Nobody thought this was fine. It had simply never been the most broken thing in any given quarter, which is how a two-day manual process survives six years.
- 340-tab workbook, one owner, no tests
- Close took 9 working days end to end
- Two restatements in the prior 18 months
The middle, which did not go well
Six weeks in, the automated match was worse than the spreadsheet
The first rule set matched 71 percent of lines. The workbook, with a human applying judgement, was effectively matching 96. For about a month the finance team was doing their old job plus reviewing our exceptions, and the honest summary of week six is that they nearly stopped. What changed it was giving them the rule editor rather than filing tickets with us — the controller wrote the seventeen rules that took it to 94 percent herself, in an afternoon, because she was the only person who knew why a supplier sometimes invoiced under a trading name.
- Week 6: 71% auto-match, and falling confidence
- Week 9: rule editor handed over, 17 rules written in-house
- Week 12: 94% auto-match, exceptions reviewed in 40 minutes
After
The close is boring now, and one person no longer holds the risk
The number that matters to the CFO is nine days down to four. The number that matters to the controller is that she took a fortnight off in November for the first time since 2021, because the rules are written down and three people can run them.
- Close: 9 days to 4
- Three people can now run it, up from one
- No restatement since cutover
Twelve months on
Where it landed
Measured over eight consecutive closes rather than the best one, which is the only version of these numbers worth printing.
- Close duration
- 4 days
- Auto-matched lines
- 94%
- Exception review
- 40 min
- People who can run close
- 3
From 9, measured over 8 consecutive closes
Up from 71% at week 6
Was roughly 2 days of combined effort
Was 1
Against the category
Is four days good?
Compared against the 34 other 10-to-15-entity customers we have. One of these three rows does not flatter us and it is the one about time to first value.
- Median close, 11-entity peers
- 6.5 days
- Typical auto-match at 12 weeks
- 88%
- Typical time to first value
- 3 weeks
Meridian: 4
Meridian: 94%
Meridian: 9 — the slow one
…which is why the migration queues behind the reporting job rather than failing outright. The lock is held for as long as the report runs, and on a large table that can be several minutes.
The safe version is to set a lock timeout and accept that the migration may need a second pass, rather than letting it wait indefinitely and block every write behind it.
Case Study 02
The narrative take, for a study found by search rather than forwarded by a champion: the customer’s sentence first, the numbers last, and the six weeks in the middle where the software was losing to a spreadsheet.