Guide · February 21, 2025
The 2026 Finance Leaders Guide to Financial Close & Consolidation
What Is the Modern Close?
Finance leaders are navigating a volatile landscape — shifting regulations, currency swings, and scrutiny from boards and investors — while battling internal complexity from sprawling systems and manual, back-end-loaded work. Too often the close piles up into a pressure-packed sprint at period-end, leaving little time for forward-looking analysis. The modern close changes that operating model.
The modern close is a digitally enabled, exception-driven approach to financial close and consolidation, built for organizations operating in complex, fast-moving environments. Powered by unified platforms, AI, machine learning, and workflow automation, it surfaces anomalies and exceptions daily, automates reconciliations and transaction matching, and routes journals for approval and posting as part of the ongoing flow — not as a last-minute fire drill.
What the Modern Close Delivers
Continuous close
Enhanced agility to respond quickly to regulatory changes, market shifts, and internal demands.
Faster cycle times
Timely, data-driven decisions for leadership and the board.
Unified platforms
Data from multiple sources surfaces anomalies and exceptions to match, reconcile, and adjust on demand.
Reduced risk of errors
Automated reconciliations, audit trails, and real-time data validation.
Greater transparency & control
Across multiple entities, currencies, and reporting standards.
Empowered finance teams
Focus shifts from manual tasks to strategic analysis and business partnering.
Ultimately, the modern close positions finance as a proactive, value-adding function — one that supports growth, compliance, and innovation, and can guide the enterprise with confidence.
Why Close Complexity Grows
The complexity of the close, consolidation, and reporting process varies with enterprise size. A small company on a single, centralized GL/ERP, one currency, and a simple legal-entity structure has a relatively easy process. As organizations grow and become more sophisticated, it gets much harder — the close can cross multiple locations and departments, involve multiple systems, and consume a great deal of the finance team’s time and resources.
The Five Stages of Close, Consolidation & Reporting
- Sub-ledger close — close sub-ledgers into the GLs (e.g., AP, AR, Fixed Assets).
- General ledger close — perform reconciliations: bank reconciliations, standard account recons, sub-ledger recons, and post accruals.
- Data quality — gather and validate trial balances and the supporting data needed for all financial reporting.
- Consolidation — consolidate results across multiple hierarchies and accounting standards (e.g., US GAAP, UK GAAP, IFRS).
- Internal & external reporting — management reports, KPIs and dashboards, financial statements, board books, and regulatory filings.
How Finance Wants to Evolve the Close
Any time and resources freed from the mechanics of the close can be redirected to value-added work — analyzing results and supporting strategic decisions across the enterprise. So how do finance executives want to evolve the process? In Gartner’s 2022 Finance Executive Survey, at least half of respondents identified four close goals to achieve by 2025.
| Goal | Share targeting it |
|---|---|
| Faster, real-time close | 86% |
| Cheaper close | 68% |
| Error-free close | 64% |
| Touchless close | 55% |
Challenges in Financial Close & Reporting
Today the close and reporting process is more complex and demanding than ever. Manual activities, disconnected systems, and recurring errors slow the close and undermine confidence in reported results.
- 8 days
the median company now takes to close its books
The Problems We Frequently Encounter
Manual, fragmented processes
Spreadsheets and point solutions for journals, reconciliations, and matching create duplicated data, inconsistent workflows, and no visibility across business units and ERPs. Manual handoffs consume time and add risk.
AP/AR, fixed assets & cash flow
Traditional processes struggle with the volume and complexity of AP/AR, fixed-asset tracking, and cash-flow analysis. Rolling reconciliations and real-time visibility are often missing, causing last-minute surprises.
Data quality & integration gaps
Disconnected systems make aggregating, validating, and reconciling data hard. Without automated integration and unified data management, trust, traceability, and compliance suffer.
Currency translation
Local-currency results must be translated to the reporting currency at current rates — and sometimes at budget rates for comparison — adding steps and room for error.
Slow cycle times & bottlenecks
Manual matching of high-volume transactions (intercompany, bank-to-cash, invoice-to-receipt) is slow and error-prone; late-discovered exceptions delay downstream reconciliations and consolidations.
Limited control & audit complexity
Documentation and audit trails scattered across systems make audit readiness risky. Role misalignment and lack of centralized control increase vendor dependency.
Lack of agility
Rigid legacy solutions need vendor intervention for updates and lack extensibility, limiting response to new requirements, regulatory change, or growth.
Intercompany transaction matching
Multi-entity groups must eliminate all intercompany transactions and balances. More subsidiaries mean more complexity — and delays getting the right data prolong the whole close.
Tax provision & accruals
A provision must be recorded for estimated income taxes, while accruals for bonuses and impending liabilities must be tracked and compared to cash flow.
Multiple reporting standards
Operations across geographies may require reporting under several standards (US GAAP, UK GAAP, IFRS) for corporate, local tax, and statutory needs.
Multiple rollups & narratives
Results are reported through management, legal, geographical, and divisional hierarchies — including financial, statutory, management, and ESG reporting — each needing traceable adjustments and narrative.
Software Options & Trade-Offs
Spreadsheets
Pros: cheap, widely available, familiar and easy to use.
Cons: error-prone, missing key functionality, no audit trails.
GL / ERP
Pros: GL available as part of the ERP, currency translation, journals, basic intercompany eliminations.
Cons: can’t integrate data from other GLs, no support for multiple consolidation hierarchies, limited reporting.
CPM solutions
Pros: data integration from multiple sources, advanced consolidation, robust reporting, full audit trails.
Cons: extra license alongside GL/ERPs.
For mid-sized to large enterprises, the close, consolidation, and reporting capabilities in today’s leading CPM platforms are the preferred approach — built to integrate data from multiple sources, handle the complexities of close and consolidation, and provide the security, audit trails, and reporting that transactional systems can’t.
Own the Close with OneStream’s AI-Powered Platform
OneStream delivers a unified, AI-enabled, extensible platform — the Digital Finance Cloud. For global organizations, it modernizes and increases the strategic impact of the Office of the CFO by streamlining financial close and consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics, and financial data quality.
OneStream unifies core financial and broader operational data and processes in a single platform, maintaining the integrity of corporate reporting standards while surfacing operationally significant insights for business users. Applied AI and machine learning built specifically for finance automate workflows, deliver insight and context, accelerate analysis, and improve forecast accuracy — equipping the Office of the CFO to report on, predict, and guide business performance.
A Platform for the Office of the CFO
The platform is organized in three layers, unified on a single data foundation:
- Core Services — admin tools, model and rule builders, automation tools, and wizards.
- Analytic Services — visualization, layouts, KPIs, dashboards, and editors.
- AI Services — anomaly detectors, chat, clustering, and diagnostics infused across the platform.
Key Capabilities for the Close
With over 1,600 customer organizations globally, OneStream was founded to address the data-quality and functional limits of legacy finance and EPM systems. Pre-built capabilities that streamline close, consolidation, and reporting include:
- Integrated Financial Data Quality
- Guided Workflows
- Financial Close & Consolidation
- Built-in Reporting & Analytics
- Account Reconciliations & Transaction Matching
- Task Management
- Tax Provision
Customer Benefits
OneStream unleashes the power of finance by unifying close, reporting, planning, and analytics through a single, extensible solution — empowering decision-makers with the financial and operational insight to move faster, on a platform designed to scale with the organization.
Increased operational insight
End-to-end visibility of analytics and key metrics for executives, finance, line-of-business leaders, and partners.
Streamlined close
Advanced capabilities automate tasks and manage the complexity and strict standards of reporting and consolidation.
Reduced risk
More complete audit trails on data, metadata, process, and rules, with Guided Workflows that protect users.
Confidence in results
Supports US GAAP, IFRS, and local statutory consolidation, including reconciliations between standards.
Customer voice“We love the guided workflow functionality in OneStream. It ensures we’re assigning the right tasks to the right team members and provides a visual overview of what is required at each month and quarter-end. It also supports great corporate oversight on how we are progressing through the month-end close.”
Conclusion
Organizations that adopt OneStream for close, consolidation, and reporting streamline their processes, better ensure the accuracy of their results, and — perhaps most importantly — gain the agility to adapt quickly to changing business and market requirements.
Request a demo → See how OneStream helps you own the close, reclaim time, and guide the enterprise with confidence.FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is the modern financial close?
The modern close is a digitally enabled, exception-driven approach to financial close and consolidation. Instead of waiting for period-end, it surfaces anomalies and exceptions daily, automates reconciliations and transaction matching, and routes journals for approval and posting as part of the ongoing flow — turning a reactive, manual scramble into a proactive, strategic function.
How long does it take most companies to close their books?
The median company takes eight days to close its books, and 75% cannot close in fewer than seven days. Manual activities, disconnected systems, and recurring errors slow the close and undermine confidence in reported results.
What close goals are finance executives prioritizing?
In Gartner’s 2022 Finance Executive Survey, at least half of respondents targeted four close goals by 2025: a faster, real-time close (86%), a cheaper close (68%), an error-free close (64%), and — most ambitiously — a touchless close (55%).
What are the biggest challenges in financial close and reporting?
Common obstacles include manual, fragmented processes; data quality and integration gaps; currency translation; slow cycle times; limited control and audit complexity; lack of agility; intercompany transaction matching; tax provisions and accruals; and supporting multiple reporting standards (US GAAP, IFRS, statutory, ESG).
What software is best for financial close and consolidation?
Spreadsheets are cheap but error-prone with no audit trails; GL/ERP systems handle basics but can’t integrate data across GLs or support multiple consolidation hierarchies. For mid-sized to large enterprises, Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platforms are preferred — they integrate data from multiple sources, provide advanced consolidation, robust reporting, and full audit trails.
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