Continuous Close: Event Or State? An NFP Finance Specialist's View
Somewhere along the way, month– end close became an event. And bracing for the same event, month after month, wears the team down — pushing finance to work harder than it needs to. We put the question to Nunzio Giunta, Managing Partner at Giuntabell, who began by defending the teams themselves.
For finance teams across not– for– profits and education organisations, month– end has come to mean chaos. It is when the team scrambles to match invoices, reconcile accounts, track revenue across funding streams, and prepare for a board meeting that requires ten versions of the same report.
The last day of the month is not meant to be the close. But it can drag on for a fortnight, until every loose end is finally tied.
Sound familiar?
Somewhere along the way, month– end close became an event finance teams prepare for. And bracing for the same event, month after month, wears the team down. We sat down with Nunzio to understand what turns month-end into a draining monthly event — when finance teams could be operating in a state of calm, winning back the hours they lose to it.
Why has month– end close become an event?
Finance teams, he says, are among the hardest– working people in any not– for– profit or school. Whether they are working around manual processes or staying back to post the last transaction before the close, they know the numbers, and they understand what missing the close costs.
The pressure, in his experience, rarely comes from the team. It comes from an environment where an audit or the next month– end always feels like it is bearing down – when the work behind the close should be handled daily, from the first day of the month, not saved up for the last.
There is a reason the word event fits so well, Nunzio says: it carries a sense of drama. Drama has its place, but not in a finance function for not– for– profits and education organisations. A month– end that creates drama every cycle is something to design out, not endure. The alternative is a continuous close: not a recurring event to strap on safety belts, but a steady state the team operates in.
When finance teams reach that calm and understand their own part in maintaining it, the close stops being an event and becomes part of the day– to– day. Nunzio is candid about why that is hard to reach. A team buried in manual workarounds rarely has the time to experiment with a better way. The workload leaves no room to change, innovate and think beyond the ordinary, which lets the same cycle repeat, month after month.
How can you tell if your month–end close is an event or a state?
The tell, he says, is in how a finance leader answers a simple question. Ask how many days it takes to close the month, and you rarely get a straight number. Ask what the close actually looks like, and the hesitation is clear. What surfaces is a lack of confidence – not in the numbers themselves, but in how long it takes to finalise them.
What causes a slow month– end for NFP and education finance?
In most cases, Nunzio is clear that the drag is not a capability issue. Across his 25+ years working with the sector, he has seen some of the best finance people manage multiple revenue streams, juggle grant conditions, coordinate vendors, and plan the following year's budget — all inside a detailed, colour– coded spreadsheet. The skill is not in question.
The cause, he argues, is under– investment in the finance function itself. Not investment in more hours or more resources at month– end, but in the systems and workflows that automate the work and carry the team through the month, rather than from one close to the next. He frames it as two investments, not one: the systems, and the people who need to get the most out of them. Without both, the efficiency gains never arrive.
Another cause Nunzio points to is habit. Roles and routines that have stayed the same for years leave little room to ask whether there is a better way. The phrase he hears most often – “this is how we've always done it" – is comfort standing in for efficiency. The mindset shifts the moment a team starts asking a different question: could automation, or even AI, do this better? That question alone begins to change how the organisation thinks about its finance function.
How many days should it take to close month– end?
Every organisation wants a close that is automated and done within a few days – no going back to fix the prior month's entries, no reopening invoices. But even the cleanest measure of the close, the date of the last transaction posted, tends to hide a constant back– and– forth of corrections running through the process. Those adjustments can add weeks to a close.
The real cost, Nunzio says, is more than time. It is the cost of redoing work, and redone work slows the production of financial reports, which delays the point at which reliable information reaches the stakeholders who need it to make decisions.
When a close takes more than five to ten days, senior management loses the window to examine the numbers properly before a decision is made. And if the information only lands twenty days after the close date, it can be too late to act on, or even to correct.
Nunzio has seen it in practice: stakeholders making decisions on reports that were still in the ‘progress’ phase.
That is where the largest cost hides and the decisions are made on numbers that arrived too late to trust.
How does an organisation move from an event to a state?
Nunzio points to a not–for–profit he worked with that was, at the outset, almost entirely paper–based. Requisitions, AP bills, reports printed off just before a meeting. The whole function ran on hard copies that were all too easy to lose. Paper was only part of it. Too many points of friction, all manually driven and accepted without question, stretched month– end close to nearly four weeks.
The work began by automating the workflows that had relied on paper to build trust, replacing them with reports every member of the team could reach directly. As more of the routine work was automated, and as systems that had operated in isolation began to talk to each other, the month–end window steadily shortened. Further integrations are still part of the picture, but introducing a system that handles the work the team should not have to do changed the organisation's trajectory.
The result: the organisation nearly tripled in size, and the finance team held steady – no loss of resources of the kind that often accompanies a new system.
In time, it added finance professionals rather than shedding them.
Technology, Nunzio says, is an enabler. The rest is trusting the process.
How can leaders create a calm, continuous close?
For Nunzio, this is where it starts. Leadership sets the tone for finance from day one, not near month– end, not midway through the cycle, but from the first day of the month. When close is framed only around the auditors who will eventually review it, the team is working toward the wrong outcome.
Protecting the team matters, he says, because when leaders operate from a place of anxiety, finance feels that pressure directly. It creates more work. And kindness leaves the room.
Leaders carry a real responsibility to treat month– end as a process, handled with care day to day, rather than an audit to brace for. When the day– to– day is managed well, month– end largely takes care of itself — with far less friction, and without the drama. That is a close that is no longer an event, but a state of control.
And that is what a continuous close should feel like for every not– for– profit and education finance team.
Your road to creating that ‘state’ of continuous close isn’t simple, but that’s where we come in.
Every finance team can reach a continuous close. The first step is knowing where yours stands today.
Our revenue recognition health check takes two minutes. It gives you a clear read on your current process, a maturity score, and the areas worth reviewing with your team, so you can see, honestly, whether your close is running as an event or a state.