Part of: Why your month-end close keeps getting slower
The question gets asked at the start of every close-compression engagement I lead. The answer is not intuitive.
For a single-entity business at $5M to $15M revenue with a modern ERP and clean chart of accounts: three to five business days. For a three-to-five entity business at $15M to $50M with dimensional consolidation: five to seven business days. For a ten-to-twenty entity business at $50M+: seven to ten business days, assuming native multi-entity architecture and automated intercompany.
These benchmarks assume a well-configured ERP, daily bank feed integration, dimensional reporting framework, and a team with clear close ownership. They are achievable. They are not universal.
The businesses I work with are usually running at two to three times these benchmarks. A three-entity $20M business doing twenty-one days is the most common pattern. The question they usually ask is whether the benchmark is realistic for their complexity.
It is. I have seen a four-entity $40M business compress from twenty-two days to six. A twenty-seven-entity $80M business go from three weeks to ten days. The benchmark is the outcome, not the aspiration.
Getting there requires four architectural decisions most slow-close businesses have not made: multi-entity ERP with native consolidation, dimensional framework built before go-live, automated intercompany elimination, and daily bank feed integration. Each decision is independent. Each one compresses the cycle.
One diagnostic question identifies where your close is losing the most days: how long does intercompany matching take each month? If the answer is more than four hours, that is the primary bottleneck, and it is solvable in four to six weeks without a full ERP migration.
