You made it. Congratulations. We've been working really hard here. And if you can tell, I am hot. Hopefully you're around with a little more intelligence and a lot more ideas on how to approach your fast closed initiative. Let's see if I can put a bow on this course for you and send you on your way inspired.

The financial clothes is a critical process for any organization. First of all, the fast clothes is a value enhancing proposition. Improving the timeliness of information improves decision making. Shorter closes have been shown to reduce audit and compliance costs. Focusing on the quality of information will force you to consider the workload of your staff and the types of work your staff are performing. are they spending more of their time during the close processing transactions?

Or are they instead spending more time reviewing information, studying and understanding financial relationships To ensure reporting integrity, trust was a third area of concern, which is closely related to quality. When a closed process doesn't produce credible financial statements, you're more often than not finding an accounting function that's always on the defensive, and responding to requests about how certain numbers were compiled, or what has been included in specific line items. Secondly, a faster close opens up the opportunity for our accounting resources to work on other types of analysis, or to simply analyze the business more in real time. You can develop weekly or daily flash reports of key financial indicators that can help the managers at various levels control the business. Now, I've recently had a participant in one of my seminars, and we were talking about this issue of continuous reporting. Now this was an individual was working at one of the leading airlines in North America.

He made the comment that managers were adapting being provided with daily dashboards on the key financial metrics such as revenue per mile traveled and the cost per mile traveled. These daily dashboards had become so insightful that they had virtually replaced the monthly financial reports as the primary management tool. But to achieve this level of reporting, takes a real time mindset backed up with the right people process and technology. As we've discussed during today's course, the key to achieving the fast close is to work smarter, not harder. And finally, we talked about the importance of considering change management principles, because ultimately, the success or failure of your fast close initiative will hinge on your people. So whether the pressure comes from outside or the desire comes from within achieving the fast clothes is a natural evolution of everything that is going on around us.

And hopefully throughout this course, I've been able to shed a little light on the potential opportunities and give you a few ideas to take away and apply in your organization. So, thank you so much for taking this course. Please feel free to reach out to me, or to post any comments or thoughts you may have on the topic. Until next time. Don't stop to get to the top. Don't stop