Year-end financial reporting

Year-end is a critical time for finance teams — a period where all financial activity across the year must be closed out, reconciled, reported, and submitted with absolute accuracy.

It’s a vital process that ensures compliance, satisfies stakeholder expectations, informs business planning, and contributes directly to the financial health and transparency of the organization. But for many professional services firms, year-end has become synonymous with stress, last-minute firefighting, and long hours spent trying to reconcile fragmented systems.

Year-end financial reporting

Year-end discrepancies

At year-end, the inefficiencies plaguing cash flow and project financials reach a critical point.
Firstly, 100% of respondents experience discrepancies in year-end financials – this is an unavoidable problem with the current state of financial management within these businesses. As seen with project financials, the smaller the organization is, the more they struggle with the frequency of these discrepancies.

Smaller organizations can lack the resources and system maturity of their larger counterparts, meaning they can face a disproportionate burden that can snowball at year-end.

% of respondents who report that year-end discrepancies happen very frequently, by organization size

Year-end financial reporting

The human impact of consolidating year-end financials

Secondly, senior finance decision makers estimate that they spend around two full working days per week consolidating year-end financials in the run up to deadlines. That is two days of very senior-level expertise and time – time that could otherwise be spent future planning, advising the business, and driving value – lost to fragmented data and outdated systems.

The top three challenges to year-end that respondents report all feel very familiar too:

44%

Time consuming
manual
processes

40%

Lack of
integration
across systems

40%

Difficulty
consolidating
financial accounts

And while year-end shares many of the same challenges seen across project financials and cash flow, it also adds a layer of urgency and stress to finance teams, affecting their wellbeing:

61% of respondents felt like the additional strain of year-end reporting negatively impacts the wellbeing of their finance team.

Year-end financial reporting

Prevent burnout from year-end reporting

Senior decision makers recognize that reducing the increased workload that seems to come with year-end would help prevent burnout across their team (73%).

The solution though, doesn’t just lie at addressing year-end financial processes.

Integrating finance systems, consolidating finance data, and reducing the amount of manual intervention across reporting processes would go a huge way to simplify and streamline the financial management processes throughout the year, and in turn, simplify it as it reaches a peak at year-end. Doing this would protect staff wellbeing and talent; and unlock wasted bandwidth to focus on growth and not just compliance.