Most finance teams I talk to want to start automating with reconciliations. It’s the step that feels most mechanical, the one everyone assumes a computer should already be doing. It’s also, in my experience, rarely the right place to start.
The step that actually costs you the most is upstream
When I ran finance transformation projects at Unilever, De Beers, Zalora, and Revantage, the pattern was consistent. The most expensive delays weren’t in the reconciliation itself. They were upstream, in the handoffs before anyone even opened a reconciliation template: waiting on a business unit to confirm a number, waiting on someone to approve an adjustment, waiting on a system export that only one person knew how to run.
At Zalora, this is what let us take the close process from thirty days down to eight. We didn’t start by automating the reconciliation. We started by mapping every handoff in the close calendar and fixing the ones that were creating the longest waits. Automation came after, applied to what was left once the process itself was fixed.
A framework for finding your actual starting point
Before you automate anything, ask three questions about each step in the process:
- How long does this step take when everything goes right, and how long does it take when it doesn’t.
- How many people have to be involved before this step can finish.
- What happens downstream if this step is late.
The steps with the biggest gap between “goes right” and “goes wrong,” and the most people involved, are usually your real starting point. They’re rarely the ones that look the most automatable on paper.
Where this fits into a broader audit
This is the same diagnostic approach I use in an AI Workflow Audit: map the process as it actually runs, find where time and risk concentrate, and only then decide what to automate and in what order. If your close process has a step that reliably runs long, that’s worth a closer look before you buy any tool.
If you want a second opinion on where your close process is actually losing time, book a free AI Readiness Audit and bring your close calendar.