If optimising your close process isn’t a priority, you might want to reconsider. According to our recent survey, 74% of sponsors polled say that their portfolio CFOs are not meeting expectations—and the number one culprit behind this perceived underperformance is an inefficient close process.
The statistic alone is notable, suggesting that sponsors believe their portfolio CFOs are leaving money, and value, on the close process table. But it’s far more interesting when coupled with stats around sponsors’ digital priorities. 96% of sponsors want their portfolio CFOs to invest in AI-enabled finance functionalities, but only 43% say they are actively doing so.
The good news: it’s possible to address your sponsor’s two biggest mandates in one move—by harnessing AI to streamline and accelerate your close. AI-powered close acceleration solutions are already transforming the close process into a faster, more automated, and more controlled operation. The result isn’t just a quicker close; it’s a Finance Team freed from manual, repetitive work and refocused on delivering the strategic insights that drive better business performance.
The pain points: An inefficient close means mistakes and delays
An inefficient close is costly in more ways than one. It creates:
- Mistakes and missed deadlines: Manual processes are slow, error-prone, and difficult to control—turning Finance from a business enabler into a bottleneck when accurate, timely financial reporting is needed most by sponsors, lenders, and other stakeholders.
- Delayed visibility into business performance: Outdated and inaccurate financial results force leadership to operate in the dark and make critical decisions without accurate or up-to-date data—leading to resource misallocation and loss of investor confidence.
- Inability to scale with business growth: A slow, manual close process doesn’t scale. As your business and transaction volumes grow, whether it be organic or via acquisition, finance teams simply can’t keep pace without automation.
- Resource burnout and talent drain: Extended close cycles create unsustainable workloads that exhaust top talent and pull your team away from higher-value, strategic activities. In today’s competitive market, your best people should be used to drive business impact—not for low-value, manual work.
- Compliance issues: Without standardised practices and strong controls, you increase regulatory risk and financial misstatements that could elongate your audit process—creating concerns for private equity sponsors and lenders.
The solution: Harnessing AI to drive a faster close and capture greater value
Breakthroughs in generative AI, including large language models (LLMs), machine learning, and the deployment of AI agents have unlocked new opportunities to eliminate inefficiencies in the close process; what once required hours of manual effort can now be automated and streamlined. Our AI-enabled close acceleration solution—which brings to market 4 tangible use cases—allows you to redesign, expedite, and improve performance through AI-powered solutions: journal entry creation, reconciliations and reporting, transaction matching, and variance analyses:
- Journal entries: Leverage AI agents to save countless hours by automating the creation and categorisation of journal entries—reducing your team’s manual effort, improving accuracy, and freeing up Finance to focus on analysis and action rather than data wrangling.
- Reconciliations and reporting: Deploy generative AI to automate reconciliation completion and draft first-pass management reports to shorten time-to-delivery and improve audit readiness.
- Transaction matching: Deploy machine learning and LLMs to drastically reduce bank or credit card reconciliation time. Automatically match high volumes of transactions across systems using a rules-based approach—freeing your team from time-consuming searches and shifting their focus to resolving exceptions, not finding them.
- Variance analysis: Leverage natural language processing to avoid spending too much time digging into transaction and journal entry details to describe period-over-period or actual vs budget changes. Quickly surface key drivers, patterns, and root causes—enabling faster variance explanations, deeper insight, and more proactive decisions when financial outcomes deviate from plan.
The how: Rethinking your tech, data, processes, and people strategy to optimise AI
AI technology alone is not, and will never be, the singular answer to close process acceleration. You can only achieve real productivity gains and meaningful cost reduction if you rethink the way you approach the close process across multiple dimensions:
- Your technologies: AI tools are not a silver bullet. To truly optimise your close, you need the foundation of a strong integrated tech stack and infrastructure. Connecting key financial systems—such as ERPs, subledgers, procure to pay, order to cash, corporate performance management, and financial close automation platforms—with AI will enable real-time data extraction and insight generation. What’s more, AI agents can help automate manual tasks where full system integration isn’t feasible.
- Your processes: The results from AI-powered tools will only be as good as the foundational workflows and processes on which they are built. You will need to make sure you have well-established procedures and standardised workflows, which ensure consistency and collaboration across departments involved (whether directly or indirectly) in the close process.
- Your people: For AI tools to be practical and useful, they require a ‘human-in-the-loop’. The ‘human-in-the-loop’ element is a crucial level of control to interpret AI-generated insights, review for material changes or anomalies, and provide final approvals. As a result, you will need to engage skilled resources who are trained in the technology and have both accounting and analytical experience.
- Your data: AI tools rely on accurate and complete data sets (including transaction-level details). Evaluate your data environment to ensure it’s robust and organised—and invest in strengthening it where there are gaps.
The Numbers: Using AI to accelerate your close measurably increases speed and value (and it’s a must-have)
With the pressure on CFOs to drive real value and boost efficiency through the use of AI, AI is no longer a “nice-to-have” technology; it’s necessary to ensure you don’t fall behind your competition. AI helps you drive the kind of tangible close improvements your sponsors demand and expect, including[1]:
- Accelerating the process: Reduce time-to-close and reconciliation time by an average of 26% and 38%, respectively, through automating manual tasks and streamlining workflows.
- Increasing close process accuracy: Increase accuracy by an average of 39% through automation, reducing human error and ensuring more reliable financials.
- Mitigating manual effort: Decrease manual effort to close the books and effort to support audits by an average of 28% and 24%, respectively—allowing your finance team to focus their energy on more strategic priorities.
The partner: Choosing the right partner dictates whether you achieve the right results
Just implementing a technology doesn’t create business value. You’ll need a partner to help you navigate the holistic people, process, and tech journey. There are probably dozens of tech vendors flooding your inbox with AI-powered close process promises. In selecting the best partner to help you navigate your journey you should look for experts who:
- Focus on PE-backed CFOs: Accordion understands where AI does and does not add value specific to the unique requirements of PE-backed CFOs. We also “get” your sponsor’s expectations and have successfully helped create value through AI-powered close process acceleration, again and again, in a PE-backed environment.
- Pass the practicality test: Accordion makes AI-enabled close acceleration “real” by assembling a trained team of accounting and technical experts who will identify and implement close process acceleration solutions that drive measurable value, now.
- Optimise process: Accordion blends AI expertise and strong accounting acumen to act as a seamless extension of your team, building a strong, tech-enabled accounting function ready to support your company’s growth plans.
- Provide continuous support: Accordion can help support and monitor regular updates, enabling proactive decision-making rather than reactive responses.
- Bring a holistic approach: Accordion goes beyond the tech to improve the people and processes that underpin your workstreams and enhance their effectiveness, bringing a ready-to-use ecosystem to maximise the benefits of AI-powered close acceleration solutions.
The timeline: Acting now creates a competitive advantage
In the competitive landscape of private equity, every inefficiency represents a missed opportunity. AI-powered close acceleration offers PE-backed CFOs a strategic lever to drive value creation, accelerate growth, and shift your people’s efforts from manual to meaningful. By partnering with Accordion, you’re not just implementing a new technology—you’re empowering your organisation with the tools, expertise, and processes needed to achieve a competitive edge in today’s dynamic market.
[1] Business outcomes achieved by Accordion projects and/or our software partners.