Sovereign investor · Abu Dhabi
41% faster month-end close
A twelve-entity investment group was closing its books in nineteen working days. It now closes in eleven, on a single ledger, with the reconciliations evidenced as they happen.
The client
A sovereign investment group holding twelve operating entities across infrastructure, healthcare and technology, each acquired with its own finance team, its own chart of accounts and its own reporting calendar.
The challenge
Consolidation was a manual exercise every month. Entities reported on different timetables into spreadsheets that were rebuilt each cycle, so the group number was not available until the third week — by which point it was history rather than management information. Audit preparation absorbed a further six weeks a year.
What we did
We took the transactional finance of all twelve entities into a single shared service on one chart of accounts, standardised the close checklist across them, and put reconciliation evidence into the workflow rather than into a folder assembled at the end.
How we ran it
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Baseline
Six weeks measuring the real close: every task, who did it, how long it took and what it waited on.
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Standardise
One chart of accounts, one close checklist and one set of controls agreed with each entity CFO before anything moved.
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Migrate in waves
Three entities at a time, each running parallel for one cycle so nothing was cut over on trust.
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Run and tighten
The service went live at fifteen days and was tuned down to eleven over the following two quarters.
Results
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41%
faster month-end close — 19 working days to 11
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12 → 1
charts of accounts across the group
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6 wks
of annual audit preparation removed
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99.7%
reconciliations evidenced within the cycle
“We used to find out how the group had performed three weeks after it had performed. Now the number is on the table while we can still do something about it.”
