We went full remote last year. The first months felt great—flexibility, no commute, happy staff. Then March hit. Close season exposed everything. A reclassification that should’ve taken 30 minutes consumed four hours working async—waiting for Slack, scheduling Zoom calls for explanations that used to happen at someone’s desk in five minutes. Accruals, reconciliations, multi-person approvals all ground down. The real loss? Informal collaboration. Hallway conversations where problems got solved, junior staff absorbed knowledge through proximity. By summer we’d brought everyone back. I’m not anti-remote, but I keep asking: is full remote viable for complex accounting work, or just a trend that sounds better than it performs?
yep. tried it. doesn’t work. team gets scattered, collaboration tanks. need bodies in one room. remote doesn’t cut it for actual teamwork.
We learned this the expensive way. During Q2 close, one account reconciliation—should’ve been 2 hours—turned into 6 because our reconciler was remote and the approver was in office. Back-and-forth Slack messages, questions about detail, waiting for responses across time zones. By the time they could sync up for a real conversation, half the day had evaporated. The frustration wasn’t about competence; it was about friction. Every clarification became async, every decision needed a message thread, every small gap meant another round of pings.
That’s when we realized: some work genuinely needs presence. Month-end close isn’t async-friendly. The approvals, the judgment calls, the “wait, can you walk me through this?”—those happen best in real time, in the room together. We’re still hybrid the rest of the year, but during close month, the team comes in. No exceptions. The cost of pulling people in occasionally is far smaller than the cost of that friction bleeding into our timelines and morale.
Alice’s framing—that “full office is better”—captures a surface trend: 53% of accounting execs want office returns. But this statistic obscures the actual problem: unstructured remote work. McKinsey research shows productivity declines correlate not with location but with asynchronous dysfunction—undefined sync cadences, documentation debt, fragmented communication. Organizations implementing structured async (deliberate sync days, documentation standards, outcome metrics) achieved 28% higher engagement than pure remote and lower costs than full office. Commute time alone costs 200+ hours annually per employee. The problem isn’t remote; it’s workflow governance. Hybrid with intentional architecture outperforms both extremes.
Split it by work type, not location. Close season? Everyone in office, synchronous and locked. Routine entries, reconciliations, processing? Remote and fully async. Approvals happen in scheduled sync blocks only—lock your calendar, not your team to desks permanently. This works if you document everything: runbooks, sign-off standards, decision trails, approval matrices. Calendar discipline replaces physical presence entirely. No remote during close windows. No one idle waiting in office for reviews. Define your sync moments sharp. Everything else is async-first.