Top finance teams close the monthly books in under five business days. The median is six, and it has barely moved in a decade. For high-volume teams drowning in PSP and settlement data, it is far worse. This free benchmark scores your close against your peers and shows you exactly what is slowing it down.
No data exports. Your answers stay private. No sales call. Built by a 13-year Deloitte Registered Accountant.
Sources: APQC, Cycle Time to Perform the Monthly Close · BlackLine CFO trust survey, 2024.
High-volume finance teams almost always overrate their own maturity. [Add a real stat here, e.g. 7 in 10 score below Level 3.] The only way to know your number is to measure it. Twelve minutes, scored against your peers.
Benchmark my close →Fast teams use the close to confirm what they already know. Slow teams use it to discover what went wrong: chasing differences, reconstructing trails, explaining variances nobody saw coming.
Every refund, chargeback and PSP settlement that wasn't validated upstream lands on your desk at close. The volume doesn't slow down, so the close gets longer every quarter.
Adding people speeds it up for a while. Then volume catches up again.
A fast close confirms the truth.
A slow close goes looking for it.
Why close speed is a control problem, not a calendar problem
None of them are your team working slowly. They are structural: errors that should have been caught upstream, surfacing at close instead.
Refunds & chargebacks
WHERE YOUR DAYS GOThey break reconciliation, so someone chases the differences by hand, every month, before the books can close.
Multiple PSPs, different cut-offs
WHERE YOUR DAYS GOSettlement timing never lines up. Periods don't tie out, and the close waits while you reconcile across systems.
Corrections in spreadsheets
WHERE YOUR DAYS GOFixes happen outside the system, so they aren't reproducible. Next month the same work starts over from scratch.
No validation before booking
WHERE YOUR DAYS GOThe close becomes a discovery exercise: you find the errors instead of confirming the truth. The single biggest day-stealer.
The volume isn't slowing down. Hiring your way out just moves the ceiling up a floor. Real financial control is structural, established before the ledger, or it isn't control at all.
Close speed is the visible symptom. These six factors are the cause. The scan scores all six and shows you which one is adding the most days to your close.
Is truth established before data enters the ERP?
SOURCE measures whether you validate transactions at origin, before they contaminate everything downstream.
Can every transaction be traced source to journal?
TRACE measures whether you have one connected, auditable trail across all systems, not tribal knowledge.
Do you know where you stand daily, or only at close?
PULSE measures the frequency and reliability of your financial visibility. Steering, not month-end guessing.
Does the system explain why differences exist?
ROOT measures how much variance analysis is automated, versus people rediscovering the same issue every month.
Can you prove completeness at any moment?
PROOF measures whether audit readiness is structural, a byproduct of daily operations, or an annual fire drill.
If volume doubled tomorrow, would it hold or break?
SCALE measures whether infrastructure absorbs growth without proportional headcount. Scale without heroics.
SOURCE → TRACE → PULSE → ROOT → PROOF → SCALE. A chain is only as strong as the factor that breaks first.
Both feel like control from the inside. Only one survives 2× volume and a sharp auditor.
“We thought we were audit-ready. The scan found two PSP flows that never tied out. We fixed them before our raise, not during it.”
[Name, CFO] · [Company] · replace with a real, approved quote
From four FTE on reconciliation to one, without slowing the close.
Proof-of-concept to working trace in days, not a quarter-long project.
From waiting a month for reporting to live financial visibility, mid-month.
Real control doesn't mean checking more. It means building a system that doesn't need to be checked.Peter EngelFounder & CEO, Actuals · 13 years as a Public Registered Accountant & Auditor at Deloitte
Actuals builds the pre-accounting control layer for high-volume finance teams: a single source of truth across order, payment and settlement data, before it ever reaches the ledger. Because accounting truth doesn't originate in the ERP. It originates before.
Answer focused questions about how your high-volume finance setup actually works today. No prep, no data exports.
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Optional, no-pitch conversation about your Real Financial Control roadmap and where the chain breaks first.
