Let's Open the Books & Re-imagine the Close
Follow up to the "ERP Era Is Over" post from April 2025.
Big news: Cook’s PlayBooks has its first official sponsor. I’m excited to team up with Brex, a modern finance platform I’ve followed closely over the years, developed with AI at its core.
Cook’s PlayBooks x Brex: Speed. Control. Scale.
One of the biggest tensions for CFOs at high-growth companies is managing speed and control at the same time. You want your teams to move fast, to spend on tools, vendors, travel, and whatever it takes for the company to win.
But without real-time visibility and tight controls, that speed can quickly turn into chaos: mystery charges, messy reconciliations, and finance teams stuck in reactive mode.
That’s why I’m excited to partner with Brex. They’ve built a platform that helps finance teams move fast and stay in control, bringing cards, expenses, bill pay, procurement, and more into one spend management platform with built-in automation and guardrails. It’s modern finance that actually scales with you and turns finance into leverage. Learn more here.
LET’S OPEN THE BOOKS: RE-IMAGINE THE CLOSE
Thur - June 26, 2025
A few months ago, I wrote what turned out to be one of my more popular posts titled “The ERP Era Is Over - The New Era = CFO Intelligence Platform”. That post was sparked by the Operators Guild CFO Summit we had just completed with multiple demos and conversations.
Last week, I attended the a16z Finance Demo Day, where some of the sharpest new finance tools were on display. Companies like Runway, Sequence, Equals, Concourse, and Metronome showcased what’s possible when real-time data and modern UX meet financial workflows.
In a follow-up conversation with Scott Woody, CEO of Metronome, we got into the topic of how his platform could shave days off the accounting close process. That’s when it hit me:
We’re not just speeding up the close.
We’re on the verge of re-architecting the accounting close entirely.
So I asked Scott and the few other people standing around a very curious, first-principle type question:
What’s the true purpose of an accounting close, anyway?
It’s possible the only real answer these days is “Because we’ve always done it that way,” or “It’s GAAP”. P.S. - those are terrible answers!
Which led to my next few questions?
Isn’t the purpose of an accounting close to produce “Consistent and Accurate Numbers"?
And then a final few powerful questions, the type of game-changing questions which oftentimes lead to new ways of working:
How consistent and accurate do we really need our numbers to be to make great business decisions?
What if our new Finance/Ai stack is less about Ai automation and Ai Agency and more about re-designing the people-processes-system from the ground up?
What if we could deliver daily, decision-ready numbers?
Isn’t it time to make the mental shift from the “C” everyone hates “Compliance,” to the new 3C’s of financial data - “Continuous, Contextual, and Confident?
Bottom Line: Let’s Open The Books! and Re-Imagine the Close!
We’ve spent decades perfecting the Accounting Close: journal entries, reconciliations, trial balances, and GAAP compliance. For most startups and even small to midsize public companies, the reality is this:
Trial balances and balance sheet tie-outs rarely drive real operating decisions.
What the business actually needs is faster daily, weekly, and sometimes hourly decision signals. What we need is:
A “Decision Close”: fast and focused on driving the next set of operational course corrections…not accounting precision.
This post is about separating those two ideas.
It’s about asking the question most finance teams never stop to consider:
Why do we even have a “close” in the first place?
It’s time to shift our focus from wrapping up the past to creating a more agile financial support team.
From a static “close” to a live, streaming “decision reporting system.”
Core Premise: Re-Imagining the Close
The traditional accounting close is a 100+ year old fixed cadence ritual and happens only monthly and quarterly. Today’s accounting close is a legacy of batch-processing systems requiring multiple human interventions and journal entry corrections. But in the age of AI and real-time data infrastructure, here’s the question I’m now asking myself more often:
What if the very definition of an "accounting close" is wrong?
What if, instead of chasing perfection at monthly intervals, we moved to a continuous close model? This close model offers always-on, transparent visibility full of real-time targets and benchmarks to the daily decisions that create the operating activities, which in turn produce these numbers.
Why the Current Close Is a Relic
It's backward-looking. Traditional closes report what already happened at a minimum of 4+ weeks after the fact.
It's binary. You're either in a close period or not. In a world of continuous business, this creates artificial information silos.
It's fragile. Errors get discovered too late. Leaders make decisions based on stale or approximated data.
It’s frustrating and creates performance drag. Teams burn cycles reconciling vs. analyzing, much less fully understanding, and recommendations for next actions
The Close as We Know It Is a Myth
Every CFO, every controller, every board member has been conditioned to treat “the close” as the starting point for decisions. The heartbeat of finance. The final scorecard. The moment we finally think we know what happened… maybe?
But here’s the question we need to ask as we zoom out while we are building tomorrow’s finance stack.
What if our fixes are focused on fixing an obsolete definition?
Not “We’ll make it faster by streamlining it.”
Not “We’ll fix it by automating it.”
But rather: “How do we build what we really need?”
The idea that we should only understand our financials at the end of a monthly period made sense in a world of manual entries, batch processes, and a much slower-paced decision-making.
In today’s always-on, real-time data world full of Ai/ML and system-to-system APIs, and vibe coding, I’m looking at a finance and accounting world that is facing its “Blockbuster” moment.
Continuous Close: The New Operating Model
The new model isn’t monthly. It’s at least weekly with a long-term target of daily.
A Continuous Close is not just a faster version of your current close. It’s a completely different architecture. One built for daily visibility, contextual insight, operational decision-making, collaboration, and real-time comparisons.
Instead of looking backward once a month, you see change as it happens. Our peer execs are doing some of this today with marketing campaigns, recruiting dashboards, and engineering code commits. We are hamstringing ourselves by relying on our fixed mindset of what the true purpose of ‘closing the books’ actually is.
In this new world of continuous close, we don’t reconcile data after the fact. Our systems and sub-systems alert us to anomalies the moment they emerge and then offer recommendations to fix them quickly.
We no longer package up stale reports in Excel, PDFs, or PowerPoint. We dynamically huddle in daily stand-ups to review the financial data performance by product line, function, geography, etc.
The Continuous Close is a “rip the band-aid off” systems architecture and CFO leadership mindset shift. Here's what it looks like:
What Really Matters: Period-over-Period Insight
In a Continuous Close world, “Periods” are:
Today vs. yesterday
This week vs. the same week last year
This Friday vs. the last 10 Fridays
Post-product-feature launch vs. pre-product-feature launch
Region X vs. Region Y in real-time
Along with the data, we bring in the best of narrative collaboration, discussing what the data/numbers mean and creating real-time decision-making situational awareness - a concept I talk about a lot with my clients.
We turn our finance function into the equivalent of a CFO Flight Cockpit Dashboard, providing us, the CFO Pilot, the ability to react in real-time when conditions change.
The holy grail? Period-over-period insight at any granularity.
The end game? Finance becomes what everyone wants but nobody truly gets: the financial operating system of the business.
Continuous Close: The Requirements
Unified Data Layer: One source of truth across GL, revenue systems, billing, payroll, and other operational systems/metrics. For those following along these and other posts just this year (2025), this is coming fast.
Automated Reconciliation Workflows: (think daily validation, flagged variances, and click throughs to the source data)
AI + NLP (Natural Language Processing) for Analysis and Anomaly Detection. Systems that highlight unusual entries or variances without waiting for humans. Unusual spend. Gross Margin anomalies. In 2025, these are the Ai Agents that are already arriving in the demos I’m seeing.
APIs > Spreadsheets: APIs have been greater than spreadsheets for nearly 10 years now. Let’s improve these sub-systems with real-time ingestion, real-time validation, and tagging of data across these systems (with, of course, another Ai Agent cross-checking that all the “tags” are properly synced across all systems.
Narrative Generation Engines & Decision Forecasting: Your metrics come “pre-explained” with Ai surfacing what changed and why it matters. You quickly move from “versionings” of forecasts to continuously monitoring the current decisions driving the operating activities. “Prior Decisions” are now able to be compared/contrasted vs “Current Decisions” and have a real-time set of “Recommended Next Decisions”, each with a “Decision Timestamp” and “Decision Audits.”
From Scorekeeper to CFO Pilot
It wouldn’t be a true Cook’s PlayBooks post without trying to help you remember these concepts by creating new fun names/headlines and referencing decision making…so forgive me or simply bear with me:
Continuous Close turns FP&A into FP&O - Financial Planning and Operations and delivers (sorry… I can’t help myself) - High Velocity and High Quality Decisions!
And it wouldn’t be a Cook’s PlayBooks Post without Powerful Questions…
3 Powerful Questions for Your Finance Team
What changed yesterday? How fast can we know it?
How many decisions are we making based on last week’s data?
Do we really need to wait a month to mark the data you control “final”?
For those data points, what systems, processes do we need to change to “close that data” weekly?
You’ve read this far and you still want more? Then you must either be a Paid Subscriber or soon to be a Paid Subscriber.
Below is my new CFO Sidebar section for Paid Subscribers only. It avoids the tl;dr for those that don’t want it and focuses on the details for those that do.
The CFO Sidebar gets into these details:
1) How To Architect a Continuous Close System
2) Actual Systems and Finance Stack Recommendations
3) Team Structure and Org Design Changes (Acct; FP&A; New LiveOps)
4) Building a Dual Track Close
5) 1st 90 Days Starting Playbooks for Series A vs. Series C companies
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