Month-End Close Episodes

Episode #149: Month-end doesn’t have to feel like a rolling emergency. We walk through a proven, blame-free framework—the U.S. Army’s After Action Review—to turn your close into a reliable, data-driven process that gets faster and more accurate every cycle. If your calendar is packed and bottlenecks keep returning, this is the practical reset your team needs. We start by reframing performance reviews as a leadership habit that compounds. Then we break down the AAR into three simple stages: plan...

Episode #28: We must continue to improve the monthly close process so we add value and help our senior leaders do their jobs better with valuable insights about the business. Monthly close isn't only to close the books, but to really figure out what happened so we can determine if the business met expectations and we can make necessary adjustments. Monthly close requires leadership to improve the process. Episode outline: Map out the process - does it make sense? Let analysts be analysts, and ...