Close Cycle: 11 Days to 4, Before a Financing Event

Illustrative example based on typical engagement outcomes. This composite reflects the kind of result a 90-Day AI Operations Sprint is designed to produce for a mid-market, PE-backed operator. It is not a single named client.

The situation

A PE-backed services company, roughly $180M in revenue, was carrying an eleven-day monthly close. The finance team spent the first half of every month reconciling accounts across disconnected systems, chasing the same exceptions, and rebuilding the same board packet by hand. Reporting was always late and never quite consistent month to month.

That was a problem on its own. It became urgent because the sponsor was preparing the company for a financing event. A close that takes eleven days and produces inconsistent numbers does not inspire confidence in a data room. The board wanted reporting it could stand behind, and it wanted it before the process started, not after.

The approach

The engagement followed the standard sprint structure. Before any system was built, we set a baseline: eleven days to close, a measured number of finance hours consumed by reconciliation and packet assembly, and the recurring exception types that ate the most time.

From there, the work focused on one workflow, not a finance-wide transformation. We built AI-assisted reconciliation and exception handling around the systems the team already used, automated the assembly of the recurring reporting packet, and documented the new process as an SOP. Adoption was part of the engagement: the controller owned the new process, and the team was trained to run it before we left.

The result

By the close at the end of the engagement, the cycle had moved from eleven days to four. Finance hours spent on reconciliation and packet assembly dropped sharply, freeing the team for review rather than data wrangling. Just as important for the sponsor, the reporting was consistent month over month, with a documented process behind it.

• Close cycle: 11 days to 4
• Reconciliation and packet hours: materially reduced, measured against the kickoff baseline
• Reporting: consistent, documented, and defensible in a data room
• Live and adopted inside 90 days, fixed price

Why this matters for PE operating teams

A faster close is a finance win. A credible, repeatable close ahead of a financing event is a value-creation win. The difference is the before-and-after documentation: a baseline set at kickoff, a measured result at close, and adoption data showing the team is actually running the new process.

That is the evidence a sponsor and board can underwrite. And because the model is repeatable, the same approach can run on the next workflow, and across the next portfolio company. If you want to see where a result like this would land in your business, book an AI Value Creation Briefing.