The multi-entity month-end close: Where do the days go?

Month-end close for a multi-entity organisation can take up weeks of the following month. Nearly a third of mid-market finance leaders told iplicit it takes more than 14 days. Much of that time is spent on pulling together data, reconciling it and spotting errors and omissions. By scrutinising the hours spent on tasks such as entity-level preparation, bank reconciliation, intercompany matching and eliminations, you can start identifying ways to do it quicker.

‍

The short version

• Many multi-entity organisations spend weeks on each month-end close, with 29% of mid-market finance leaders at an iplicit webinar saying it takes more than 14 days.
• Consolidation isn’t difficult in principle – but it’s made complicated by incompatible systems, lengthy closes at entity level, slow bank reconciliation, currency revaluations and error-prone intercompany accounting.
• Measures such as clearer close calendars, more reliable bank feeds, consistent coding and frequent reconciliation will save time.
• But your efficiency efforts will hit a ceiling without automation to speed up consolidation.

If you’re handling the finances of multiple legal entities, you may well find yourself still working on a month-end close at a time when the month in question is rapidly becoming a distant memory. There’s so much data for you to pull together and reconcile that it’s not uncommon for the job to run into weeks.

Some groups skip the whole exercise and only consolidate at year-end. But if you’re in an organisation that needs comprehensive management information refreshed regularly, that isn’t an option.

The sequence of tasks involved in gathering, mapping and checking all that data presents one potential time sink after another. In the third of a series of articles on multi-entity consolidation, we look at how long month-end can take and how that timescale can be shortened.

How long does a multi-entity month-end take?

iplicit research published in 2025, based on a survey of 1,000 finance leaders in the mid-market, found 55% were taking longer than a week to produce month-end information, 30% were taking over two weeks and 13% over three weeks.

At a 2026 iplicit webinar, 26% of poll respondents said it was taking 6-10 days to close month-end, 41% said 10-14 days and 29% more than 14 days.

In one extreme case, a group of 300 companies hired someone to work full-time on consolidation. “Some organisations certainly spend at least two weeks of every month on their consolidation, then start again on the next month,” says Guy Burton, Technical Solutions Consultant at iplicit.

“It depends on the size of the group and whether every entity is on the same software,” says Guy. “If they’re all on the same version of Sage 50, that’s easier than if one’s on Sage 50 and three are on Xero, or some are on Sage 200. Different systems give different outputs.”

In principle, creating a consolidated set of accounts shouldn’t be that complicated, he notes: “It just means taking a trial balance from each company and adding them together.” But since data needs to be pulled together from multiple sources, there’s every chance some of it could be late, incompatible or just plain wrong. All of that extends the month-end process significantly.

‍

What holds up your multi-entity month-end close?

You know roughly how long month-end is taking – and you’ve probably found yourself asking “Why does it have to take this long?” In fact, you might have murmured that question to yourself as your eyes darted constantly between the clock and a spreadsheet containing more populated cells than one of His Majesty’s prisons.

In truth, you probably have some decent hunches about where the hours are going – but a proper review of the bottlenecks might reveal opportunities to speed things up.

Entity-readiness

You can’t do much to close the group as a whole if you’re still waiting for data from individual entities. Often, the processing for those entities will be handled by different teams or individuals, under different pressures and with varying degrees of efficiency. You won’t necessarily be able to pull that entity-level data into a group report on demand.

Sub-group consolidation

The wait for data gets longer if you have different group structures sitting within the same organisation – perhaps with several entities in one sub-group and a couple more in another. In a situation like that, you have to consolidate each sub-group before doing the overall consolidation, which adds more levels of complexity.

Bank reconciliation

That wait for entity-level data will be longer if bank accounts aren’t being reconciled quickly and efficiently. If someone has to manually match a bank statement with entries on the ledger, there’s a limit to how much you can hurry the process along.

Intercompany matching

For many finance teams, the work of recording transactions between entities in the group remains stubbornly manual. You record an intercompany purchase as a debit in the books of the buying entity and then enter the corresponding credit in the accounts of the selling entity. It’s time consuming – but not nearly as time-consuming as clearing up the confusion if it’s not done with scrupulous accuracy.

Currency revaluation

If you’re accounting in more than one currency, you’re potentially adding significant time to the consolidated month-end close. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with entities that are based overseas and produce their own local set of accounts in their base currency.

A lot will depend on your consolidation methodology. Do you convert to sterling at the rate that applies at month-end? At an average rate for the period in question? Or some other rate that you agreed at the start of the year? Some methods might be simpler than others but all will take time if you’re doing the calculations yourself.

Intercompany eliminations

Reviewing those transactions between entities and stripping them out of the consolidated accounts tends to be another lengthy exercise. If the debits and corresponding credits weren’t accurately matched earlier in the month, this is where you’re going to find yourself going down rabbit holes trying to identify the mistake.

How to shorten each stage

It’s worth reviewing each of the tasks that affect your month-end consolidation to see what time could be saved. Half an hour shaved from any part of the process can contribute to a significant time saving in total.

Have clearer close calendars

There’s little point in one entity turning round its figures quickly if you’re still waiting for data from another part of the group. Some entities’ processes might genuinely take longer than others’ – but having clear deadlines and setting things up so they can be met helps minimise hold-ups at the consolidation stage.

Earlier, more reliable bank feeds

Are you working with bank feeds that update daily, or in real time, so you don’t have to download CSV files or key in data from statements? If so, is everything running well, with the right account mappings? If not, this is an area where you’ll be able to remove significant manual work.

Consistent coding

If you can implement an identical chart of accounts across the group, you’ll save a lot of time on consolidation. If Sales is always Account 1000, then adding up total sales means summing Account 1000 across all your trial balances.

Sometimes it can’t be as easy as that. Perhaps one entity works fine with a single sales account but another needs more granularity, necessitating Accounts 1000, 1010, 1020 and so on. Or perhaps entities operate in different sectors where nominal accounts don’t naturally align. But the more consistent you can make those charts of accounts, the less time you’re going to spend on mapping them across to the group’s chart of accounts as you consolidate.

Reconciling throughout the month

The more of this work you can get done in increments throughout the month, the easier the month-end work will be. That’s easier said than done when the team is dealing with urgent work much of the time. However, carving out time for regular work on these processes will not only reduce the month-end workload but should also make errors less time-consuming to find and rectify.

Where iplicit comes in

Most organisations can find efficiencies that shave some time off month-end close. But the only way to get consolidated information in real time is by automating much of the routine transactional work and keeping the data in a unified system.

A merger with another multi-academy trust left Excalibur Academies Trust with 15 schools running their finances on separate copies of Sage while another five shared a different system. Bank reconciliation took three weeks.

Moving to iplicit cut that time to one week, with the trust on course to cut that to 2-3 days by completing a centralisation plan. “When you’re pulling data from so many different sources and manipulating it manually, it’s very open to error,” says Louise Kingscott, Director of Finance. “The big difference now is the confidence I have in the data coming from the system.”

At recruitment group Opera Holdings, intercompany administration for eight entities was “the hardest part of running the group”, according to Group IT Director Simon Alderman. A move to iplicit offered automatic bank reconciliation, templated reporting and intercompany eliminations. “Things are easier and quicker,” he says. “There’s no question that it’s saving us time.”

The bottom line: when you run out of shortcuts

It is possible to save time on month-end consolidation by finding efficiencies throughout the process and standardising methods and deadlines throughout the group. But at some point, your efficiency efforts are likely to hit a ceiling.

Unless your organisation is very small, producing consolidated information in anything even approaching real time is impossible without capable software to automate routine tasks and pull together the data. With the right systems, consolidation isn’t a periodic event but something that happens constantly in the background, giving you access to the group picture whenever you need it.

See for yourself

iplicit saves organisations substantial time on month-end tasks, from bank rec to reporting. To see it in action, take a three-minute tour of the software or talk to us about consolidation to see how it would work for your organisation.