One Person Runs Your Month-End Close

Month-end comes around every four weeks. In many businesses, one person owns the entire close. Finance lead, operations director, or sometimes the owner. The process lives in their head, their spreadsheets, their inbox.

Pain: Finance lead is the only person who can run month-end.

The problem is not competence or willingness. The process exists only in one person's memory and their personal folder of files. There is no written sequence, no handover note, no way for anyone else to step in without a full briefing from the person who is unavailable.

This is Key Person Dependency: a critical process concentrated in one individual who is not the founder. When that person is unavailable, the process stops. Or it runs badly. Or it runs late. In month-end terms, that means delayed reporting, delayed decisions, and a close that relies on memory rather than method.

Fix: Document the steps and have someone else dry-run it this month.

The dry-run matters as much as the document. When a second person follows the written steps and hits a gap, that gap gets added to the document. One dry-run turns a rough process list into a working handover. After that, you have two people who can run month-end and a written process that survives departures, absence, or a change of role.

This is what building operational resilience actually looks like. Not a big programme. One process, one dry-run, this month.

Which process in your business would stall if one person were unavailable next week?

Related: When the Line Gets Twitchy Because One Person Is Off, the Knowledge Has Not Been Captured

Browse more short operational fixes at simpleris.co.uk/insights.