Many accountants have a love-hate relationship with financial month-end. While this time of year can provide an organization opportunity to achieve more value, it can also require heavy workloads and long hours. It has become the norm for many to work evenings and weekends to meet deadlines.
Using Scrum and lean principles, our organization’s accounting department has reduced our month-end close from two weeks to two days – with less people, and no overtime. The implementation of these tools, combined with a meaningful change in our company culture, improved accountability, flexibility, teamwork, and communication.
Read on to explore how your team can achieve a more efficient financial month-end with this helpful framework.
Scrum
Scrum is an agile product development methodology. Although many successful organizations such as Amazon and Microsoft use Scrum extensively, the method is often underutilized outside of tech companies.
Scrum breaks down the financial month-end into three phases:
- Planning
- Sprint
- Retrospective
Exhibit 1: The Three Phases of Financial Month-end1
