We wrapped close at 2am Tuesday after our controller got approval on a $47K accrual reclassification that should’ve been resolved Monday afternoon. Our CFO was in Frankfurt for a conference. I needed him to sign off on moving equipment rental charges from maintenance to capital, which changes how we report the line items to our finance committee. This happens every other month—different amounts, always requires his review because of our audit requirements.
So I’m sitting there at 5:30pm Monday with everything else locked down, just waiting on this one item. I flagged it as urgent, called his phone twice—nothing. He didn’t see it until 9am Frankfurt time, which was 1am here. Six hours lost, and now we’re scrambling because the board expects preliminary numbers Wednesday morning.
I get it—geography happens. But there’s got to be a better system than hoping your executive team is awake when you need them. We can’t give me approval rights without audit pushback, so it’s not like I can just execute.
How are the rest of you handling this? Are you documenting approval thresholds differently, or do you have someone with secondary signoff authority standing by?
I get it—I’ve been there. When I first migrated to Beancount, I had a similar bottleneck with our CFO in a different timezone. Six hours waiting for a $47K accrual approval? That’s rough on your close.
Here’s what shifted things for me: I stopped thinking of the close as one monolithic approval gate. Instead, I broke it into tiers. Routine accruals? Those we pre-approved quarterly based on patterns. Month-end reconciliations? Delegated to our senior accountant. Only the true exceptions—unusual transactions, material variances—needed the CFO’s eyes right away, and I batched those.
The magic was knowing what could wait until next business day versus what absolutely needed sign-off before closing the month.
So here’s my question for you: When you look at your typical close, what percentage is truly routine versus one-offs that genuinely need your CFO’s judgment? That split will tell you where you can create breathing room.
With strong delegation frameworks and pre-approvals in place, you can route routine items efficiently and keep critical issues on the partner’s desk.
I respect that, but I’ve seen this play out differently. That framework looks great until your team starts executing the pre-approved list without questioning whether something actually belongs on it. In fifteen years at Big Four and running my own firm, the firms with the tightest controls weren’t the ones with the best documentation—they were places where people still challenged assumptions. Pre-approvals work only if you’re willing to push back when something feels off.