Financial Consolidation: 4 Ways to Close Faster With Less Stress

Most finance teams have made real progress on improving the pace of financial close. According to Planful’s 2025 Global Finance Survey, nearly seven in ten finance teams now close the books within five days.

But speed at the entity level doesn’t guarantee speed at the finish line. The same survey found that 37% of teams still need six or more days just for financial consolidation adjustments. That’s where the real pressure builds.

As organizations grow, consolidation complexity grows with them: more entities, more currencies, more ownership structures, and heavier scrutiny from executives and auditors. Even teams that “close fast” on paper can find themselves stuck here.

This post covers four practical ways finance teams are using modern financial performance management (FPM) platforms to bring control, predictability, and confidence to financial consolidation.

One in four finance leaders in the 2025 Global Finance Survey reported difficulty tracking and auditing consolidation adjustments during close.

Close stress often starts with uncertainty, including which entities are done, which are waiting on approvals, and where the bottleneck actually is. Poor data integration compounds this, creating information silos that make it difficult to identify issues and course-correct during the close.

Planful’s consolidation solution gives finance teams an at-a-glance view of where every entity stands: submitted, approved, or still in progress, eliminating the need for status emails and manual tracking meetings.

As data flows in, the system maintains a complete audit trail of data loads, adjustments, and workflow activity. This simplifies SOX support and provides clear visibility into how numbers change between versions.

The access model supports both local and corporate needs:

• Local teams work within secure, scoped views of relevant data
• Corporate finance maintains full visibility across the consolidation hierarchy

Governance and consistency are enforced through role-based permissions and controlled workflows rather than manual oversight.

Clear ownership is what separates a smooth close from a chaotic one. Planful integrates with Adra Task Manager to bring operational, strategic, and financial data together in one place, giving your team a single source of truth for cross-functional collaboration.

By integrating Adra Task Manager into your Planful instance, you can:

• Assign close and consolidation activities across the business
• Track progress by task and owner
• Spot delays before they become problems

That ownership extends beyond close. With Spotlight for Microsoft 365, you can refresh Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents with a single click, pulling the latest Planful data directly into your reporting. When a number gets questioned in a board meeting, you can drill back into Planful to validate it on the spot, no scrambling required.

Pinnacle Therapeutics, a healthcare organization managing budgets across 140 facilities, puts Spotlight to work every month-end. Before Planful, pulling together a detailed presentation for leadership took around eight hours. With Spotlight’s direct connection to Excel and PowerPoint, that same process now takes two.

“Spotlight is a direct connection between our system and Excel,” said Bobby Nepa, Senior Manager of FP&A at Pinnacle Therapeutics. “We can set up the file how we want and just hit refresh. That’s been huge for smoothing out our reporting process.”

Across the team, Planful cut more than six hours from Pinnacle’s monthly reporting prep and saved 70+ hours during annual budgeting.

Nearly half of teams (47%) still rely on manual data entry and adjustments during the financial consolidation process, according to the 2025 Global Finance Survey. That manual load is one of the most addressable sources of close friction.

Planful’s structured journal framework is designed to eliminate it. Entries are defined once and applied consistently, reducing manual effort and minimizing period-over-period risk.

The Planful platform supports three types of automated journal entries:

• Standard journals handle straightforward debits and credits, with auto-reversing logic that eliminates cleanup in the following period.
• Recurring journals support entries with defined start and end periods, including commission accruals, bonus accruals, and similar items to ensure consistency without manual re-entry.
• Dynamic journals calculate amounts automatically based on data. Instead of maintaining formulas, you define rules that update as inputs change. Common examples include allocating IT costs by headcount or performing equity pickups based on net income percentages.

You define the logic once. Then you review results instead of recalculating them.

Non-controlling interest and intercompany eliminations are configured directly in the platform, removing the multi-tab spreadsheets that are difficult to validate and easy to break, which is a meaningful improvement for the 34% of finance leaders who cite complex ownership structures as a major consolidation challenge.

This matters at scale. Alltech automated 95% of its intercompany eliminations with Planful, reducing manual reconciliation effort and delivering more predictable close cycles.

“It used to take us 20 working days for global consolidation. Planful enables us to reach the draft global consolidation by working day seven and a hard close by working day 12. That’s across 140 entities. Planful is just amazing for speed and accuracy,” said May Xu, Deputy CFO, Alltech.

Forty-three percent of finance leaders cite complex intercompany transactions and eliminations as a major source of close friction. When balances don’t match, and the root cause isn’t obvious, consolidation stalls, yet the clock keeps running.

Instead of manually checking AR and AP balances across entities, Planful uses variance reports and heat maps to automatically flag out-of-balance elimination sets:

• Pre-set thresholds highlight discrepancies visually, without digging through multiple entities or spreadsheets
• Variance reporting isolates whether discrepancies stem from timing, data, or structural differences, so you can correct issues before they impact close timelines
• Patterns emerge over time, allowing you to address recurring issues upstream and reduce rework month by month

The result is a shift from reactive firefighting to proactive management.

Consolidation doesn’t have to be the most stressful part of the close. With real-time entity visibility, rules-based automation, and reporting that holds up under scrutiny, the pressure drops quickly.

The biggest impact of adopting financial consolidation software like Planful is how the Finance team operates. You’ll spend less time chasing issues and more time supporting the business. Financial consolidation becomes predictable, explainable, and repeatable. Close becomes a managed process, not a monthly fire drill.

• Real-time visibility is the foundation of a faster, less stressful close. Consolidation slows down when entity status, adjustments, and ownership live outside your financial performance management platform.
• Rules-based automation for journal entries and intercompany eliminations removes the need to rebuild logic every period. Define it once, review results instead of recalculating them.
• Reporting that connects directly to your source data means you can defend your numbers on the spot. When questions come up in a board meeting, you should be able to answer them in seconds, not hours.

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Find out what a modern close looks like in practice

Get an on-demand demo to see how Planful takes the stress out of financial close and consolidation.

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1. What makes the financial consolidation process so difficult?

The financial consolidation process becomes difficult when organizations rely on manual adjustments, spreadsheets, and disconnected ERP systems. It’s especially hard to validate numbers, track changes, and explain results under tight close timelines when finance teams have to manage multiple entities, intercompany transactions, and ownership structures.

2. What are the biggest causes of delays in financial consolidation?

The most common causes of consolidation delays are manual journal entries, intercompany eliminations that don’t match up, inconsistent close processes across entities, and limited visibility into close status. When finance teams can’t see where issues exist in real time, problems surface late in the process and slow everything down.

3. How can finance teams improve the financial consolidation process?

Finance teams can improve the financial consolidation process by standardizing close workflows, automating journals and eliminations with rules-based logic, and centralizing consolidation in a single financial performance management platform.