From month-end scramble to repeatable close: how AI is changing the way finance teams close the books

We know this feeling. The last few days of the month arrive and suddenly everything depends on the right people being available, the right data being in the right place, and nothing going wrong. For finance teams managing complex, multi-entity closes, that is not a process. It is a high-stakes routine that resets every thirty days.

In this session, Warwick Leitch, Director, Product Management, is joined by Mary Beth Fichter, VP Corporate Controller, who lives this reality every month. Together they get into what it actually takes to break that cycle: where the bottlenecks live, what AI changes when it runs across the full close workflow rather than one isolated part of it, and what it looks like when finance owns the process completely without waiting on IT to make an adjustment or fix a rule. This is a real conversation between a product expert and a finance leader who has been in the weeds of the month-end close and knows exactly where it breaks down.

What you will walk away with

• How finance teams are breaking down the bottlenecks that make every close feel like the first one

• What AI does inside a close workflow: where it catches errors, where it validates data, and what that gives the team back in time and confidence

• What "finance runs this, not IT" looks like when your team configures rules, adapts workflows, and manages approvals without raising a ticket

• An honest benchmark for whether your current close is built to run consistently, or built around the people who happen to know how it works