11 One Day...
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11. One Day Close Page 1
11. One Day Close
Objectives
Throughout this course we’ve explored the basics of lean accounting. We’ve talked about reducing transactions, making reporting more useful and dynamic, and aligning financial analysis to how lean organizations operate. Imagine applying those concepts to the most common and frequent batch-‐style financial process in most companies: the monthly financial close. In most companies it takes days and perhaps even a week or two to close the books. Imagine doing it in a single day. Don’t think it’s possible? Many lean companies already do this, including multi-‐billion dollar multinationals with operations spread around the globe. Let’s explore the topic in this final teaching lesson of the course. Specifically, by the end of this module you’ll understand a simple way to calculate the costs of closing the books… we’ll also provide some tips to help reduce the time-‐to-‐close, and, in the process, we’ll discuss the important difference between being accurate and being precise while preparing the books.
Cost of Closing Now, unfortunately, many organizations spend days and even weeks closing their books and preparing financial statements each month… and, even worse, some organizations are lucky to close their books before the middle of the following month! With this said, have you ever wondered how much it’s costing your organization to do this? One way to find out is to do a simple calculation to determine how much time and money is going into preparing financial statements at the end of each month. This table shows a simple way to estimate the cost of closing the books.
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Simply list everyone from the accounting group that’s involved in the process, then write down the day within the closing window that they start helping as well as the day the final report is ready. In the above example, Sally starts helping on the 4th day of closing the books. Since the final report comes out on the 10th, she’s been involved for 6 days. From this simple method you can see how many days each month are dedicated to closing the books. In this example, about 45 total days each month, which is 540 days for the year. In an organization that works Monday through Friday there are 260 working days available each year and for 7 people that makes a total of 1,820 available days for work. 540 days is 30% of the total time available! To calculate the financial cost you might consider using a simple average salary instead of exact salaries for each person. You can, of course, use exact figures if that works better for you. In the above example, $8,653 per month or more than $103,000 per year are being spent. And, to make matters even worse, all this effort is spent generating information that’s likely already out-‐of-‐date!
Quick Closing Tips What each organization needs to determine is whether this makes business sense… if it doesn’t we’d like to present some quick closing tips that, when implemented, should radically improve your end of month closing process. As always, your organization will have to consider what works best for you so feel free to adapt the following advice accordingly.
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The first tip is “Don’t just fix the numbers, fix the problem.” You see, many organizations spend a lot of time making corrections to last month’s books without asking why there was a mistake in the first place. You can eliminate a lot of transactions and reduce time-‐to-‐close by encouraging people to be problem solvers and investigate why there’s a mistake that needs correcting, and then start fixing the problems! The second tip is “If it isn’t important, it can wait.” When you look over your current end-‐of-‐month journal entries, you might find that many of them are fixes for insignificant amounts of money that really don’t provide useful information for making decisions. And, rest assured, according to the materiality principle you’re not required to report amounts that are too small to make a difference. The third tip is to “Move transactions out of the closing window.” While some things, like income taxes, can’t be done before the end of the month, you’ll likely find several that can be done outside of the closing window, such as depreciations, payroll, and warranty reserves. If you’re familiar with SMED, or single minute exchange of dies, you’ll probably see the similarities. With SMED, the idea is to do as much work as possible while a machine is running, which is analogous to the time outside of the closing window, and then focus on improving the process for tasks that must be done while the machine is stopped, which is similar to the closing window. Of course, if you’re not familiar with the SMED process we’d invite you to study our Quick Changeover Course! Let’s take payroll as an example. Many people use outside payroll services, which means they need to transfer the payroll information they receive to the general ledger to close the books each month. If you’re waiting until the end of the month to deal with these transactions consider adding them to the general ledger when they’re received; or, even better, find out if the payroll service can provide electronic records to eliminate the need to manually transfer the data. The next tip is to “Choose accuracy over precision.” For example, reporting something as 29.63% might be very accurate and precise, but 30% is also accurate. Of course, if you can be both accurate and precise that’s great… but there are always tradeoffs and often the numbers you’re dealing with are estimates, such as with warranty reserves. The matching principle says that an organization must show a projected warranty expense whenever a product is shipped. Estimating warranty expenses can take up a lot of time but the estimate doesn’t do much to improve overall understanding of the company and product performance, so why not keep the estimation process simple. For example, use prior warranty costs, say last years, and calculate them as a percentage of sales. Then, use this percentage to estimate monthly warranty reserves by taking the current month sales times the
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percentage you calculated. To move this process outside of the closing window, take the sales for all but the last day of the month and then estimate the final day sales using a method that makes sense based on prior sales trends. Remember, this is just an estimate, so worrying about being precise is not important, but continually review the numbers to make sure they’re accurate. This might require making occasional changes to the ratio. Remember, a sophisticated calculation doesn’t make it more useful, so if you can keep it simple it will be easier for everyone. The final tip we have for making it easy to close the books is to continuously review the transactions that occur at closing. And let the process owner decide if his or her task is value added. That way, no one is offended by someone else telling them their work isn’t worth it!
Do We Need to Close? Lastly, we’ll leave you with one final question to ask yourselves: Do you need to close the books every month? As your organization becomes capable of closing the books in very little time, you might start asking yourselves what the value of closing the books each month is. To be clear, we’re not recommending you stop closing your books, but we do suggest you consider the reason for why you go through the effort to ensure it’s a valuable process. The value might simply be to celebrate the monthly success, or the information might be used to make strategic decisions. Remember, providing visual and understandable feedback is a daily activity, so don’t feel you need to wait for the financial report at the end of the month to make improvements! OK, that wraps up this module and, at least for now, the final teaching lesson of this course. As we’ve mentioned throughout this course Lean Accounting isn’t an easy topic to master… so feel free to review the videos in this course as many times as you’d like. And we’d also encourage you to seek out additional information related to lean accounting… which is precisely what we’re going to focus on in our next module!