The close that keeps getting longer
You see the same five symptoms in nearly every finance team we walk through, from a single accounting group to an enterprise running many entities. None of them are about effort; they are about plumbing.
Close cycles running 10+ business days
Peers at your scale close in five. The gap is data plumbing and manual reconciliation work, not effort.
Manual journal entry consuming 40+ hours/month
Senior accountant time that should be on FP&A and decision support, not spreadsheet keying.
Intercompany eliminations rebuilt in spreadsheets every cycle
Because the ERP can't do them cleanly, the workbook becomes the system of record.
Audit prep starting two weeks before fieldwork
Reconciliation evidence is scattered across email, file shares, and ad-hoc folders nobody can find at 9pm on a Tuesday.
The close getting longer as the company grows, not shorter
Headcount additions help marginally; process automation compounds.
What you receive
A self-contained diagnostic package your finance leadership can act on, with or without us.
Close-cycle process map
Every step from cutoff to close-the-books, with current hour cost per step.
Automation scoring
Each step scored on rule complexity, volume, data structure, stability, error impact, and technology compatibility. Same six-criterion framework we used across Fortune 500 finance transformations.
ROI projection
Conservative, moderate, and aggressive scenarios with payback period estimates per automation candidate.
Technology recommendations
What's already in your stack (M365, Power Query, Power Automate, your ERP) that can do the work, and where targeted RPA makes sense.
90-day automation roadmap
Sequenced by ROI and dependency, with effort estimates per phase.
What the math typically looks like
For a single-entity finance team ($20M to $500M revenue):
Automating the highest-friction close steps at this scale can typically recover 30-50 hours per cycle, about $25,000-$60,000 per year of finance-team capacity at a blended fully-loaded labor cost of $70-100 per hour. The larger value usually shows up in redeployment: senior accountants moving from spreadsheet rework to FP&A, decision support, and the strategic work the CFO actually wants from them.
For multi-entity organizations and health systems ($1B+ revenue):
At this scale, recovered capacity can reach 200-400 hours per close cycle as consolidation overhead, intercompany eliminations, and audit-evidence gathering compound across entities. At that blended labor cost ($90-130 per hour), that's $216,000-$624,000 per year of recovered finance capacity, before counting compressed audit prep, earlier financial visibility for capital-allocation decisions, and the lower external audit fees that follow from automated documentation.
Your specific numbers fall out of the assessment; we anchor every recommendation to your actual baseline, not industry averages.
Where the recovered capacity goes
The work being automated is not analysis. It is data movement. Manual journal entries, reconciliations that require typing the same number into two systems, intercompany eliminations rebuilt from scratch every cycle, audit-evidence packaging that's 80% lookup and 20% judgment.
Automating the data movement gives senior accountants back the capacity to do the work they were hired for: exception investigation, variance analysis, FP&A support, audit-response prep, system-level financial planning. The recovered hours don't go away. They get redeployed to the work that compounds.
This is the answer to the unstated question every finance leader asks before approving automation work: what happens to my people? Forge RPA does not replace people. We replace the manual work that prevents them from being the analysts you hired.
There is a turnover dimension that often gets overlooked. Roles built around manual data movement run higher attrition than analytical roles. People leave repetitive jobs more than jobs that develop them. At a fully-loaded turnover cost of $15,000 to $50,000 per event, even a modest reduction in attrition adds up quickly. Automation does not eliminate jobs; it eliminates the friction that drives people out of them.
How it works
Two to three business days, end to end. Finance-led. No IT lift in the diagnostic phase.
Discovery
Stakeholder interviews, process observation, SOP review, system inventory across the close cycle.
Analysis
Six-criterion process scoring, ROI modeling per candidate, technology matching to your stack.
Delivery
Executive presentation, detailed report, prioritized 90-day roadmap, and Q&A.
Common questions
How is this different from a generic process audit? +
A process audit tells you what's broken. Our assessment tells you what to automate first, how much it costs, what it saves, and how long it takes, with the math grounded in your actual baseline, not industry averages.
What if our ERP can't be automated against? +
Most ERPs can be: through API, through scheduled extracts, or through targeted RPA at the UI layer. The assessment surfaces which path fits your specific environment. We've worked across SAP, Workday, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage Intacct, and several niche ERPs.
Do we need to involve IT in the assessment phase? +
Not for the diagnostic itself. IT involvement starts at implementation. The assessment is owned by finance.
What's the assessment fee, and is it creditable against later work? +
Pricing is scoped to your environment after the discovery call. The assessment fee is creditable against subsequent automation work with us if you decide to engage within 60 days.
Know exactly what to compress and by how much
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We will walk through your close cycle, your reporting pain, and what a 2-3 day assessment could surface in your environment.