Time to Close the Gap: Rethinking the Month-End
Published: July 31, 2025
The financial close is broken, and what’s needed isn’t just a back-office fix, it’s a whole new strategic imperative, argues Albert Malikov, Founder, Stacks.ai, as featured on TMI's Innovation Lab
The financial close is mission-critical, but still riddled with inefficiency, fragmentation, and stress. Despite huge advances in technology, many finance teams remain buried in manual processes – every transaction must be entered, categorised, and reconciled by hand, followed by hundreds of checks to ensure accuracy. The process is slow, cumbersome, and outdated, and it's holding finance back.
Most companies take 12 to 15 days to close their books each month. That’s half the month gone before leadership even has a clear view of financial performance. By the time insights reach the decision-makers, it’s often too late to act, leaving the C-suite arguably flying blind.
In today’s fast-paced business environment, that delay is more than inconvenient – it’s a competitive risk and the longer it takes to close, the harder it is for finance to play a proactive, strategic role. Something has to change.
Agentic AI’s expanding role in finance
Businesses such as Hospitable.com, Supermetrics, and Bloom & Wild are already turning to agentic AI [provided by Stacks.ai] to transform the financial close and reclaim control and clarity at one of the most crucial junctures of financial reporting. It’s a shift from finance as a reactive function to finance as a high-impact, strategic partner to the business.
By automating manual tasks and syncing fragmented workflows, agentic AI tools enable teams to reduce reporting burdens and create space for work that truly matters. It does this not just by automating tasks, but by intelligently co-ordinating workflows across systems. Unlike traditional rule-based automation, agentic AI understands intent and context. It can manage multi-step processes end-to-end, adapt to changing inputs, and keep tasks moving without constant human intervention.
Beyond the close
Finance teams are under growing pressure to close the books faster, with greater accuracy and fewer resources. But for many, the process still feels like a high-stakes race against time.
Teams that integrate agentic AI are seeing close times halved, reconciliation efforts reduced by more than 90%, and audit cycles streamlined significantly. But perhaps more importantly, they’re gaining real-time visibility, clearer accountability, and a single source of truth for compliance and reporting.
This isn’t about replacing human judgment. It’s about equipping finance teams with the tools to work smarter and anticipate issues before they arise, allocating resources more effectively, and bringing an end to the last-minute scramble.
For forward-thinking CFOs, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but how to do so in a way that unlocks both speed and strategic value.
And it’s not just the close that’s being transformed. AI is reshaping other finance processes too. With tasks, reconciliations, and approvals all tracked in one place, finance teams have full transparency and traceability for every action – making audit readiness part of everyday operations.
Spotlight on Cleo
Cleo, the UK-born personal finance assistant used by millions globally, is one company engaged in modernising its internal finance operations. Despite already outperforming peers on monthly reporting speed, Cleo’s finance team wanted to push further, eliminating manual processes and positioning itself to scale with the fast-growing business. The team turned to agentic AI to reduce friction in the close and release more time for strategic work.
Using Stacks.ai, Cleo has cut journal entry processing time by 80%, saving around four hours every month. Manual inputs into Xero are no longer needed, thanks to intelligent bulk upload capabilities.
Beyond individual tasks, Andy Murray, Cleo’s Head of Finance is taking a proactive stance: migrating close management, reconciliation prep, and key workflows into one AI-native platform. With plans to roll out AI-powered transaction matching and introduce clearer segregation of duties, Cleo is building a finance function ready to grow at pace, without wrestling spreadsheets.
Cutting through complexity
As agentic AI evolves, it promises to reshape not just the close, but the entire finance function. By co-ordinating workflows and connecting systems, these tools will increasingly help finance teams cut through complexity and operate with greater speed, accuracy, and strategic focus.
Looking ahead, the real potential lies in unifying processes across departments, enabling finance to lead with clarity and contribute more directly to business-wide decision-making.
The goal isn’t speed for speed’s sake – it’s smarter finance. It’s looking at how new thinking can help finance teams reclaim control at one of the most crucial junctures of financial reporting, so they can focus on what matters: uncovering insights, optimising performance, and helping the business move forward.