Closing the books on the second working day.
Month-end at Tidepool took a fortnight and three reconciliations. Postings now arrive correct, so the close is a review rather than an investigation.
2-day close, down from 14
- Customer
- Tidepool Marine
- Sector
- Aquaculture and seafood processing
- Scale
- 1,480 staff, six sites, three reporting currencies
- Duration
- Sixteen weeks, with the first two-day close at the fourth month end
4 phases, in the order they happened.
- Weeks 1–4
Posting defect study. 4,000 postings sampled and classified; validation rules drafted from what was found.
- Weeks 5–9
Ledger and Stock configured. Chart of accounts reduced from 1,180 accounts to 604.
- Weeks 10–13
Payables live with three-way matching. Both processing partners moved onto structured invoicing.
- Weeks 14–16
One parallel close run alongside the old process; intercompany moved onto a single document.
What changed, measured.
Every figure came from Tidepool Marine. Where one is a median or a sample it says so.
2 days
Working days to close
From a range of eleven to fifteen days over the preceding year.
19
Adjusting journals after day one
Monthly average, down from 214.
96.4%
Postings needing no correction
Over six months, against a sampled baseline of 88.7%.
604
General ledger accounts
Down from 1,180. The 576 removed had no movement in two years.
A fortnight of finding out what had happened.
Month end at Tidepool took between eleven and fifteen working days. The finance team of nine spent roughly the first week establishing what the numbers were and the second explaining them to the people who had caused them.
Three reconciliations dominated: harvest volumes from the farm system against inventory, third-party processing invoices against goods received, and intercompany transfers between the Norwegian and Scottish entities. All three were performed in spreadsheets, after the fact, by people comparing two lists.
The close was not slow because the accountants were slow. It was slow because roughly one posting in nine arrived wrong, and the close was the first point at which anybody looked.
Fixing arrival, not the close.
We spent the first four weeks not touching the ledger. Instead we sampled 4,000 postings from the previous quarter and classified every correction that had been applied to them.
Forty-one per cent had a missing or wrong cost centre. Twenty-two per cent landed in the wrong period because a goods receipt was entered late. Eighteen per cent had foreign exchange applied at the invoice date rather than the receipt date. Eleven per cent carried unmapped item codes from the two processing partners. The remainder were genuine one-offs.
Every one of those four is a rule, not a judgement. That is the whole argument: a defect a rule can catch should never reach the ledger, because once it is in, finding it costs perhaps a hundred times what refusing it would have.
What went in.
Ledger holds the books. Payables takes vendor bills into a queue where they are matched against the purchase order and the goods receipt before anything posts; a bill that cannot be matched goes back to the supplier with a reason rather than being accrued and chased. Stock posts cost of goods at the point of movement, with the harvest system feeding it through Link on a fifteen-minute cycle.
Intercompany was the one place we changed the process instead of the software. Both entities now post from a single document, so there is nothing left to reconcile.
Adjusting journals raised after day one fell from an average of 214 a month to 19, and the chart of accounts lost 576 accounts that had carried no movement in two years.
Our auditors used to arrive in March and ask why there were four hundred journals in the first week of every month. There is no good answer to that question. Now there is no question.
Three others, from three different starting points.
Different sector, different product, the same argument about where the data should live.
34% shorter sales cycle
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0 standing privileges
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45-minute first response
qDesk
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Helix Instruments · Laboratory instruments and consumables
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See what Books does before you read another story.
General ledger built for multi-entity. There is a full trial on books.cedxsystems.com, and an engineer who has run a migration like this one will walk it with you.