Unblocking 40% capacity for FP&A team with operations across four countries
Process mapping and targeted automation shortened month-end process, cut manual reconciliations, and shifted finance time from admin to higher-value analysis for a European offshore energy producer.
Starting point
The client’s finance month-end had grown into a 15-business-day marathon. Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) teams based in the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Denmark followed different practices and processes. Activities were duplicated, reconciliations were heavily manual, and local workarounds had accumulated over time.
Most of the teams’ capacity in the first three weeks of every month went into closing the books. Very little time remained for analysis, forecasting, or partnering with the business. Leadership knew the process was too slow and too manual, but did not have a clear picture of what actually happened when, by whom, and with what value.
The CFO and Financial Controller set four objectives: shorten close to single digits, remove work that did not add value, automate high-friction steps, and quantify both time and cost savings in a roadmap they could own.
Approach
Finance leadership engaged a strategy and operations team to run a rapid but rigorous diagnostic and design a set of practical solutions that could realistically be implemented. The team included Bhuvan Maingi, who now leads Strathen Group, as lead strategy consultant.
The work began with a structured diagnostic, starting with interviews of twenty-eight people across geographies, capturing how month-end really worked rather than how it was documented. They used SIPOC and detailed process maps to log every activity involved in closing the books, then consolidated these into a single one-page month-end map. In total, they catalogued 267 activities and logged 106 issues and observations.
Next, he synthesized opportunities. Each pain point was translated into a potential change, with estimates of effort and benefit. Forty opportunities were identified and grouped into themes such as reconciliations, reporting, accruals, time-writing, workflow, joint venture processes, and clearing and recharges. An effort-versus-benefit lens helped the CFO and Financial Controller select a focused set of eight solutions that could materially shift close time and cost.
Solution design went beyond high-level ideas. For each of the eight priority solutions, he drafted a solution statement that described the change, the teams affected, the process impacts, and quantified time savings. Examples included:
- Reconciliations: streamline the reconciliation portfolio and automate matching in a dedicated tool so people spend time on exceptions rather than manual ticking and tying.
- Reporting: rationalize reporting packs, remove unused outputs, define a clear reporting hierarchy, and build toward a finance data warehouse to automate data manipulation.
- Accruals: remove non-material accruals, use SAP plan-based functionality where possible, and automate large manual calculations.
- Time-writing: standardize tools and processes across regions and automate SAP loading and reconciliation to cut rework.
- Workflow and orchestration: implement a single month-end workflow or orchestration tool to replace spreadsheets and email trails for status, approvals, and sign-offs.
- Clearing and recharges: redesign processes to minimize pooling and apply rules-based allocation and automated clearing.
To anchor the business case, the team built a time and cost model. They captured a baseline of 1,085 hours of effort per month-end cycle and tied 847 hours of that to activities addressed by the eight solutions. Of those, they estimated that roughly 528 hours per cycle could be removed, automated, or materially reduced. Using a fully-loaded cost assumption, this translated into £271,000 in annual savings, alongside the qualitative benefit of more time for analysis and business partnering.
Finally, they worked with finance leadership to design a new operating rhythm for a 9-day close. This included clearer cut-off dates, hand-offs, and controls; alignment across the four countries on a minimum standard month-end; and a roadmap for implementing the priority solutions without disrupting business as usual.
Instead of pushing teams to work faster, leadership asked for a first principles view of the work, then cut and automated what did not need to be done by people in the first place.
Outcome
The engagement gave the CFO and Financial Controller something they had not previously had: a transparent, quantified view of month-end across four countries, plus a focused set of solutions to shorten close and free capacity.
The one-page month-end map and SIPOC repository showed, step by step, where activities overlapped, where approvals and hand-offs caused delay, and where manual reconciliations, rework on time-writing, and bespoke joint venture processes were consuming time without adding much value. This shifted the conversation from anecdotes about “too much work” to specific tasks, owners, and hours.
The priority solutions and cost-benefit model gave leadership a credible plan to move from a 15-day to a 9-day close. They could see which changes would deliver the biggest time savings, which required new tools versus better use of existing systems such as SAP, and how implementation effort compared to expected benefits.
For finance teams, the work also reset expectations about their role. By removing non-material accruals, automating reconciliations and data manipulation, and introducing a single workflow view, the design freed up time that could be redirected toward analysis, forecasting, and partnering with the business on decisions rather than just reporting them.
The finance month-end optimization became a reference point for broader operational excellence efforts. The discipline of mapping work, prioritizing a small number of high-impact solutions, and linking them to a clear operating rhythm has since been applied to other processes that similarly tie up expert capacity without moving the business forward.
For finance leaders, the shift was treating month-end as a designed service with a target cycle time, not as a fixed routine that had to be endured the same way every month.
This project continues to influence how Strathen Group designs finance transformations, mapping work end to end, removing non-value activities before automating, and tying every solution to clear time savings, cost impact, and a tighter operating rhythm.
