Welcome to this overview of best practices for a quicker financial clothes throughout the course I'm just gonna call this the fast clothes. My name is Blair cook and I'm a many times CFO and a corporate director, who also happens to specialize in developing thought leadership for the Office of the CFO. This topic happens to be one that is a common challenge for many a CFO and controller, and that is finding ways to get information in the hands of decision makers in time to make a meaningful impact on how the business is run and managed. When I think about how information dissemination has changed in the last decade, the implications have been profound. printed books are now being replaced by self published books, reference and research material has moved from the library to Google and Wikipedia. Newspapers are being replaced by all online news sites.

Even cable news is increasingly being replaced by even faster and more readily accessible sources of news using mobile devices and using feed from social media such as Twitter. These are trends that on the surface, you might think have little to do with achieving a fast financial close, but as I think about it more, I think it has actually everything to do with today's topic. A recent Aberdeen study found that 64% of business managers have seen their decision making time shrink over the last year. Another Aberdeen survey found that 28% of business manager said they needed data to make decisions within an hour of a business event, and another 42% needed that information within a day. management information needs including financial statements are now defined In terms of days and hours, not weeks or months, I studied by addre match indicated that 90% of the surveyed financial executives were experiencing pressure to close the books faster.

Think about your own organization and determine for yourself your own management information needs. How fresh is the financial information provided to your stakeholders? Are the financial results driving decisions, or have those decisions already been made with or without good information? Most of my work these days is at the board level. And I'm going to admit to you that there's often a concerning lag between what period ends and when the information is circulated. And when you get information that is a month old, it often feels like old news.

When this happens, often the financials need some additional commentary on what has happened since the period ended. Just to round out an understanding of the current state. Like it or not, the accounting function is in the news distribution business. As financial professionals, the challenge is upon us to find ways to keep up with the hyperspeed of modern business and information dissemination. If we can all agree that having timely financial information for decision makers helps with improving the management of the business, then we can work backwards and discuss ways to speed up the preparation of financial information. Another interesting question from the study asked whether participants were satisfied with the quality of their financial close process.

And interestingly, 61% of respondents felt that quality two was a challenge. And when asked whether they completely trusted their reported numbers, nearly three and four respondents did not Not. So in many cases, we have a closed process that lacks timeliness, trustworthiness and quality. This gives us a really good starting place for our course today. So during this course, I want to cover off three important areas. First, to identify the bottlenecks that tend to bog down our financial closed process.

I wonder how many of these your organization is suffering from. Secondly, to discuss some practical ideas for achieving the fast close, I scoured the literature and reflected on my own experiences, to pick the best of the best ideas for helping you speed up your clothes process. And finally, to suggest an approach for making it happen. If I were to ask you, which was the most important of your technology processes or people in achieving the fast close, what would you guess Hmm, Guess you're gonna have to hang around for our third lesson to find out which of these poses the greatest barrier to your success. So let's get started by clicking on the first lesson to begin