A 40-day close, cut in half without hiring anyone.

The situation

The bottleneck was the two people least able to be a bottleneck.

Accounts payable ran through a first round of approval that required the CEO and the COO. Two executives whose attention was the scarcest resource in the business had been placed directly in the path of every routine invoice. Predictably, invoices queued behind them, and the month-end close stretched to roughly forty calendar days.

On the other side of the balance sheet there was no accounts receivable function to speak of. The company sold into major wholesale accounts, but nothing systematic existed to collect from them, reconcile against them, or catch the deductions and penalties those relationships generate.

What I did

Push accountability down, then automate what remained.

Two parallel tracks: unblock the payables path, and build receivables from nothing. Neither required new headcount.

• Removed the CEO and COO from the first round of approval and empowered other managers across the organization to be accountable for their own vendor relationships. The approval right went to the person who actually owned the relationship and the budget.
• Led the communication with vendors directly to improve the quality of invoices arriving in the first place — reducing processing time at the source and raising internal accountability for expenses incurred.
• Built the AR function from scratch. I gathered and organized the AP management platform data personally, worked with operations to fix the EDI setup, and created an escalation process to identify and fix issues quickly — which cut the penalties being paid to wholesale customers.
• Implemented Ramp to automate expense GL coding. That shortened the close, reduced coding errors, and created user-level accountability for money the company was spending.

None of these are clever. They are ordinary corrections that had gone unmade because nobody owned the whole chain.

What changed

Close halved, $2M collected, and no one new hired.

In aggregate the month-end close came down from roughly 40 calendar days to about 21, inside four months, without adding a single resource.

The receivables function — which had not existed — collected $2M from accounts including Ulta, Best Buy and Nordstrom. The AP process ended up simpler and faster while carrying more internal accountability than the version that had required two C-level approvals, which is usually the sign that the original control was theatre rather than control.