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When month-end close runs late, the first place everyone looks is the accounting team. Yet the source of the delay is rarely the last day of the month; it is the rest of the month: how expenses are collected, approved and booked. Each of the five habits below looks small on its own. Together they stretch the close by days.
1. Saving receipts up for month-end
An employee keeps receipts in a wallet, an inbox or a phone gallery and sends them all in the final week of the month. The finance team then has to squeeze a month of work into a few days, and that is exactly when the missing receipts come to light.
The fix is to capture the receipt at the moment of spend. If a photographed receipt reaches the system the same day, there is no pile left to clear at month-end.
2. Making approval depend on one person
If every expense waits for a single manager's approval, that manager's holiday or one busy week is enough to bring the close to a halt.
Naming a deputy in the approval flow and setting a shorter approval chain for small amounts noticeably reduces the number of expenses left pending.
3. Checking the policy after approval
When an expense that breaches the spend policy reaches accounting, a chain of questions begins: accounting asks the manager, the manager asks the employee, and the correction goes back through approval.
When the policy check happens as the expense is entered, the employee sees the missing document or the exceeded limit before submitting it. The correction is made at the moment it costs least.
4. Matching the corporate card statement by hand
The card statement sits in one spreadsheet, the receipts sit somewhere else, and someone matches them line by line. The work is slow and open to error; a few unmatched lines hold up the entire reconciliation.
Matching a card transaction to its receipt automatically lets the team look only at the exceptions that do not match.
5. Rewriting the accounting entry
Keying an approved expense into the ERP system by hand means typing the same information a second time. Once the mapping between expense type and accounting account is defined, the entry is created as the natural result of the approval. Masraff works with more than 20 ERP systems, including SAP, Logo, Netsis and Mikro.
Where to start?
There is no need to change all five at once. Start with whichever step kept everyone waiting longest at last month's close: in most companies that is the backlog of receipts or the approvals piled on one person. Fixing even one habit pulls the next close noticeably forward.