What does your month-end look like? Finance team chasing invoices from three weeks ago? Approvers ghosting you on email? Purchase orders buried in email threads? Thankfully, these are things you can change to work smarter, and improve compliance and control at the same time.
Month-end is synonymous with long hours, last-minute scrambles, and countless follow-ups. But for most Xero finance teams, the problem isn't the accounting. It's the manual workflows and approval delays that cause the most obstructions.
The good news? A faster month-end doesn't mean cutting corners. It's about cutting out friction, getting better visibility, and giving your team what they need to close confidently.
Here are five ways your Xero finance team can speed up month-end without compromising on accuracy or compliance.
Key Takeaways
• Accounts payable management is about controlling how money leaves the business, not just paying invoices.
• Consistent rules and workflows reduce friction more effectively than simply processing invoices faster.
• AP risk often shows up in daily workarounds and inbox chaos before it appears in financial reports.
• True AP improvement shows up in both KPIs and calmer, less reactive day-to-day operations.
• Automation adds the most value when it applies clear policies consistently and preserves an audit trail.
1. Identify your approval bottlenecks and banish them as early as possible
Let’s start with the biggest culprit: approvals. They’re commonly cited as the number one cause of slow month-end closes. And this kind of bottleneck shows up in frustratingly familiar ways:
Invoices sitting unopened in someone’s inbox for days
Confusion over who’s supposed to approve what
Finance teams spending hours (often across time zones) chasing stakeholders
Approvals getting lost in email chains or Slack threads
The solution: Automate your approval workflows. With the right software, approvals automatically route to the right people based on pre-set rules. Your finance team has visibility over what has been approved, what is still pending and where the delays are happening - well before the month-end deadline.
The results can be dramatic. Green Cross Health, a New Zealand healthcare provider processing 10,000 invoices monthly, reduced their approval time from 2+ days to just 5 minutes—a 96% improvement. Similarly, The Icehouse investment firm cut approval times by 80% and now saves 40+ hours per week that were previously spent chasing approvals.
For Xero users, this means fewer last-minute surprises and significantly more control over the close process.
Quick win: Map out your current approval process this week. Identify where invoices typically stall (hint: it's usually the same two to three people) and have a conversation about accountability and turnaround expectations.
2. Take control over purchasing and accounts payable
Beyond approvals, the other big challenge is late or incomplete invoices showing up at month-end. You might be familiar with these - missing PO numbers, unclear coding, or invoices that should have been submitted weeks ago.
To stay ahead of this kind of chaos:
Approve invoices before they are entered into Xero
Standardise coding and approval rules across your team
Minimise rework by ensuring all necessary information is collected upfront
When your accounts payable and purchasing processes are well-organised, month-end transforms from a scramble into a predictable routine. KeepCup, which processes 300 invoices monthly across three entities, saved 6.25 days per month (equivalent to 3 months per year for one FTE) after implementing standardised invoice workflows with automated approvals.
3. Improve visibility across your finance team
Month-end slows to a crawl when no one has a clear picture of what's outstanding. Spreadsheets and status update emails simply don't cut it - they're outdated the moment you send them.
Ask yourself right now: Could you confidently answer these questions?
What invoices are currently waiting for approval?
Who needs to take action on each one?
What's ready to be posted in Xero today?
Where are we most likely to miss the deadline this month?
If you're hesitating on any of these, your processes need better visibility. Real-time dashboards eliminate guesswork, help your team prioritize effectively, and stop finance from becoming the "follow-up function" during close.
What good visibility looks like: Your team can open a single dashboard at 9am and immediately see the status of every transaction in the pipeline. No digging through emails. No asking around. No surprises.
4. Make a month-end checklist - and stick to it.
The secret to a faster month-end is that it doesn’t start at month-end. Create a rolling checklist that is baked into your team’s daily and weekly routines. This should include:
Recurring AP tasks with specific due dates throughout the month
Accruals and journal entries that can be prepared in advance
Approval deadlines for invoices and spend (for example, ‘all invoices from week 3 must be approved by day 25’)
Stakeholder reminders scheduled at regular intervals, not just at the eleventh hour
Month-end is a lot more predictable when everyone knows what needs to happen and when. And this checklist isn’t just for your finance team. Make sure you share the relevant parts with those people within the company who hold budgets and approve frequently so they too can plan accordingly.
Here’s an example of a regular month-end timeline:
Days 1-10: Submit all invoices from the previous month
Days 11-20: Complete first-pass reviews, chase missing approvals
Days 21-25: Final approvals and posting deadline
Days 26-30: Reconciliation, accruals, and reporting
Adjust these windows based on your team's capacity and complexity, but the key is consistency. When people know the rhythm, compliance improves naturally.
5. Review and refine after every close
No two finance teams are the same, and what works for one organisation may need tweaking for yours. High-performing teams treat month-end as an evolving process, not a fixed routine.
After every close, invest 30 minutes in a quick retrospective:
Where did delays occur this month? Was it the same department or person as last time?
What recurring bottlenecks are we seeing? Are certain types of transactions always problematic?
What worked well that we should continue? Don't just focus on problems—reinforce what's working
What's one thing we can improve for next month? Keep it focused; you don't need to overhaul everything at once
Document these insights and track your improvements over time. You might notice patterns like "invoices from the marketing team are consistently late" or "international approvals always bottleneck." These patterns become your roadmap for targeted process improvements.
Pro tip: Keep a shared document where team members can add friction points as they encounter them throughout the month, not just during the post-close review. Fresh observations are more accurate than trying to remember issues weeks later.
Closing faster without losing control
For Xero finance teams, faster month-end doesn’t mean working longer hours. High-performing workplaces need to focus on streamlining processes, automating approvals, and giving everyone visibility into what’s happening.
When approvals and spend controls are handled efficiently, finance teams can close the books faster with greater confidence and fewer headaches. And more importantly, they can work less reactively, and start becoming more strategic.
Is your month-end process ready for an upgrade?
Take our 60-second diagnostic:
Do invoices regularly sit unapproved for more than 3 days?
Does your team spend more than 5 hours per month chasing approvals?
Are you unable to see approval status without asking multiple people?
Do surprise invoices appear in the final week of the month?
Has your month-end close timeline increased over the past year?
If you checked two or more boxes, your approval workflows could benefit from automation.
How ApprovalMax can help
Ready to see how it works? ApprovalMax helps Xero teams automate approval workflows while maintaining full control and audit visibility. See how we can help your finance team work smarter and close faster - book a demo today.
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