Finance close co-pilot

Operational Excellence · Initiative playbook
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Operational Excellence

Finance close co-pilot

Month-end close drags because journal categorisation and variance commentary are manual.

The problem

Month-end close drags because journal categorisation and variance commentary are manual.

The play

AI auto-categorises journal entries, flags anomalies vs. last 6 months, and drafts variance commentary. FP&A reviews and approves rather than authors.

Headline KPI

Days to close
8 days≤6 days
BAU owner
Finance

Tools in the stack

NetSuiteClaudeLooker

Rollout plan

  1. 1
    Discover
    Audit the current process, instrument baseline metrics, and confirm the bottleneck with the BAU owner.
  2. 2
    Design
    AI auto-categorises journal entries, flags anomalies vs. last 6 months, and drafts variance commentary. FP&A reviews and approves rather than authors.
  3. 3
    Pilot
    Run with October close. Measure against the success criteria below; iterate weekly.
  4. 4
    Evaluate
    Review against: ≥30% reduction in manual JE review. Decide go / no-go with Finance.
  5. 5
    Embed in BAU
    Hand over to Finance with runbook, dashboards, and on-call rotation. Schedule 60-day ROI check.

Success criteria

Pilot scope
October close
Definition of done
≥30% reduction in manual JE review
BAU owner
Finance