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.
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