EY Singapore has released guidance recommending that finance functions move away from traditional, period-end record-to-report processes in favour of a ‘continuous close’ corporate reporting model.
The accounting firm said conventional close cycles are heavily manual and concentrated at period-end, leaving finance teams more focused on validating data than generating insights. In contrast, it argues, the continuous close approach embeds financial activities throughout the reporting cycle, giving CFOs real-time visibility and more accurate forecasting.
EY identified four areas organisations need to address for the shift to succeed:
- Treating the close as an end-to-end process
- Establishing global process governance
- Building an integrated digital ecosystem
- Integrating AI to support continuous monitoring and anomaly detection