The problem: Poor visibility and accountability of month-end processes
The finance team in a major American bank needed a better way to manage month-end closes. The team was using an in-house tool for these processes, which offered little more functionality than a spreadsheet. It was used to assign groups and teams specific tasks but there was no visibility of progress or whether tasks had been completed and at what time. The team wanted more visibility and accountability across the month-end close process.
This process included registering expenses, who paid, what went in and out, and tying up financials to ensure the books were balanced. The team needed to ensure everything was reported correctly for a sound budget. Because of the lack of functionality in the system, completing these processes could take a few days of team members going through journal entries and checking balance sheets against receipts and files.
The solution: Implementing Cutover runbooks for month-end closes
The team decided to adopt Cutover as the tool for managing month-end closes instead. This was easy to implement - the team built linear runbooks and users could mark their tasks as completed, and overall progress could be viewed via dashboards for better visibility.
170 users migrated from the old systems onto Cutover, and they are now using the platform at the end of every month. This requires minimal effort as they have created a standardized runbook template within Cutover to clone and use every time. This means the system required minimal effort to set up an easily repeatable process.
Cutover’s audit trail and dashboard ensured both internal and external visibility and reporting.
The outcome: Time saved on month-end closes
The move from internal tooling and spreadsheets was seamless and provided the team with much more functionality to ensure their month-end closes went smoothly. The team particularly benefitted from the repeatability and time savings thanks to runbook templates that could be reused every month.
“The rollover process from our internal tool to Cutover couldn’t have been smoother.”
