A slow month-end close sets off a domino effect.
Until the books are closed, finance teams can't update the forecast, dig into variances, or give leadership a clear read on what last month actually looked like. Every day spent closing is another day those decisions wait.
To uncover the biggest contributors to a slow financial close, Vena surveyed over 600 U.S. finance and accounting professionals who work directly on their company’s month-end close. Across the full sample, the average month-end close takes 6.2 business days from start to finish, and 78% of respondents said their team has had to go back and restate or correct numbers within the past year, even after that close was already marked “complete.”
But in the window between a close being marked “complete” and someone catching a mistake, those numbers are already circulating in board updates, cash decisions, and next month’s forecast.
Much of the problem comes down to business complexity, our research shows, from how many entities a team consolidates to how many systems it stitches together by hand.
This study walks through how entity count, system sprawl, role and industry shape the speed and accuracy of the financial close, and what finance teams say would actually help.
Confidence in the close doesn’t spread evenly across a finance team, and it peaks at the top, our research finds.
Every respondent in this survey, including those in executive roles, was screened as someone directly involved in the month-end close process. Finance executives, including CFOs and VPs of Finance, report confidence in the accuracy of their month-end close numbers that stands out compared to other employees. 75% call themselves very confident in the accuracy of the numbers, compared with 63% across all other roles combined.
But that confidence doesn’t hold up against their teams’ actual record. Among executive respondents, 32% say their teams have had to restate numbers frequently in the past year, more often than any other role — compared to just 19% for every other role combined.
There are a few plausible explanations for that gap. Executives typically sit a step removed from the day-to-day work of producing the numbers, so they may have less visibility into the manual workarounds and last-minute fixes it takes to get there.
A restatement also isn’t always a sign that the close itself went wrong. Among teams that restated numbers in the past year, late or missing information from another department was one of the two most common causes of the most recent correction (27%), nearly tied with data entry or manual errors (28%). And because executives are ultimately on the hook when numbers have to be restated, they’re likely the most aware of how often it happens on their teams.
As we’ll see in the data below, these kinds of structural challenges—such as how many company entities must provide their input—play a big role in why the month-end close tends to stall.
More entities means more sets of books to consolidate (in many cases living in separate systems), and that extra work shows up directly on the calendar.
Against the survey’s overall average of 6.2 business days, teams juggling more than 10 separate entities take more than two full days longer, averaging 8.3 business days, while single-entity teams close in 4.7 business days.
Those extra days eat into the time a team would otherwise spend making sense of the numbers after the close wraps up, with tasks like digging into variances, updating a forecast, or briefing whoever needs to mobilize on what the actuals show.
A month-end close that drags on for a week or more leaves less room for the analysis work that Finance is actually there to do.
Overall restatement rates rise sharply with entity count and then dip slightly: 67% for single-entity teams, 89% at 7–10 entities, and 82% past 10. But the frequency of these restatements (where a company encounters more than one instance within a year) rises considerably the more entities a company has. Thirty-one percent of teams with 7 to 10 entities have had to issue corrections multiple times in the last year, compared to 13% of single-entity teams—more than double.
More entities usually means more departments and business units to coordinate with, and that shows up directly in what finance teams blame when something goes wrong.
When asked what their top two challenges were in the month-end close process, “chasing down information from other departments” outranks every other financial close challenge in this survey, cited by 34% of respondents.
Reconciling multiple source systems creates a similar kind of drag as having a large number of entities, but the effect is even more pronounced.
Ninety-two percent of teams pulling from 7 to 8 separate systems during the financial close process had to correct a number in the last year, compared to 57% for teams pulling from 1 to 2 systems.
Teams pulling from 7 to 8 systems also carry the heaviest manual workload. Among them, 52% said they spend half or more of their close timeline manually consolidating data, compared to 15% of teams pulling from 3 to 4 systems (more than 3 times as many).
Manual consolidation means copying, reconciling and cross-checking numbers by hand between systems that don’t talk to each other.
Every one of those steps is a fresh chance to introduce an error that will need correction later. Because different corporate entities often run on their own systems, entity count and system sprawl tend to compound, so complexity stacks up quickly.
What’s more, teams working only from spreadsheets, with no dedicated financial close software, spend a quarter or more of the month-end close on manual work at a rate of 71%, compared to 52% for teams using their ERP’s built-in consolidation features.
And spreadsheets aren’t the only siloed source of information finance teams are relying on. Thirty-seven percent of finance teams still source data from email or shared documents on top of whatever system they use. And those teams average 6.8 business days to close, compared to 5.9 for everyone else.
Among the 488 teams that had to correct or restate a number in the last year, the top two causes were nearly tied. Data entry or manual errors accounted for 28%, and late or missing information from another department accounted for 27%. That near-tie suggests that disconnected workflows are just has responsible for inaccuracies in the month-end close as actual data errors.
Examining the data across industries adds another layer to what’s causing frequent errors in the close process, on top of entity count and system sprawl.
Among Financial Services and Insurance companies in this survey, 92% said they’ve had to issue restatements, compared to 77% across every other industry combined.
This survey didn’t ask respondents to explain that difference directly, so we can’t say for sure what’s driving it. That said, Financial Services and Insurance companies often face heavier regulatory scrutiny than other industries in this sample, and many also maintain a broader web of subsidiaries and holding structures.
A similar finding emerged when we looked at frequency. Among Financial Services and Insurance companies, 35% have had to correct their closing numbers multiple times in the last year, compared with 18% across all other industries combined (nearly double).
Finance teams across the survey point away from throwing headcount at the problem and toward a different kind of solution. When asked what would help their team with the month-end close the most, here’s what respondents had to say:
AI-powered tools for flagging errors also made the list. Executives cite it as a potential solution most often (37%), non-manager accounting and finance staff pick it least often (16%), and teams that have already had to restate their numbers pick it more often (29%) than teams that haven’t (19%).
When it comes to fixing the month-end close process, finance professionals in our survey have called out the main culprits: disconnected source systems and processes that aren’t standardized across entities.
Vena Financial Close and Consolidation integrates with your source systems and standardizes the close process with workflow controls—all while allowing your teams to stay within Excel.
Want to see how Vena can help streamline your financial close and consolidation process for yourself? Take a self-guided tour.
Centiment conducted the survey for Vena. The survey was fielded between August 20, 2026, and August 24, 2026. The results are based on 624 completed surveys. To qualify, respondents had to be U.S. finance and accounting professionals who are directly involved in the close process.
Data are unweighted, and the margin of error is approximately ±3.9 % for the overall sample at a 95% confidence level. Findings broken out by role, number of entities, or number of systems come from subgroups of roughly 60 to more than 100 respondents within the larger sample of 624. Every comparison in this piece was tested for statistical significance before inclusion.