If there is one thing that raises anxiety within the financial unit, it's the financial close, that is, the process by which financial statements are finalized for filing with the SEC.

Any CFO will tell you how high the stakes are and how heavy the pressure from above is, especially from CEOs whose main goal is to hit short-term targets. There has long been a movement to somehow improve the process, making it easier for the right information to flow to the right people who then assemble the financial report.

CFO.com weighs in with an interesting look at how companies are once again grappling with process improvement. At some companies, the bid to better close the books had been interrupted by the likes of XBRL, Sarbanes Oxley and IFRS, but the article notes some companies are now rethinking their processes.

Microsoft was held up as one example: "Rather than have finance staff in each organization submit financial analyses as spreadsheets attached to e-mail messages or posted to departmental file shares, they post them to a new ‘Financial Close' portal, a centralized collaboration and document-sharing web-based repository."

"The financial statements and supporting documents are interlinked to 10-Q or 10-K forms, so that finance and management, as well as auditors questioning a figure, need only click to see the documentation behind them. To date, Microsoft's finance team has halved the ‘close-disclose' cycle, from approximately 16 days to 8."

All in all, we'll likely see more vendors pick up on this, especially the big ERP types with highly developed financial modules.

For more:
- here's the article

Related article:
Rethinking the financial close