If your finance team is still waiting 8-12 days to close the books each month, you’re not alone. You’re also not doomed to take this long forever. The difference between a 12-day close and a 3-day close often comes down to one critical factor: IT dependency.
According to Gartner, 76% of finance teams cite IT dependency as their primary barrier to agility, with the average team waiting 3-5 days just to get custom reports. That’s not a minor inconvenience. Deloitte’s latest CFO Survey reveals that these bottlenecks cost organizations an average of $250,000 annually in lost productivity per finance team.
The good news is that you don’t have to live with these bottlenecks. The right kind of automation in the right places can reduce your IT dependency and bring your time to close down to three days.
The Real Cost of IT Bottlenecks
Here’s what the typical month-end close looks like for many SAP users:
You need a variance analysis report. You submit a ticket to IT. You wait 3-5 days. The report comes back, but it’s not quite right. Maybe the dimensions are off, or you need additional fields. Another ticket. Another wait. Meanwhile, the close deadline looms.
Multiply this across dozens of reports, journal entries, and data validations, and suddenly you’re looking at a 12-day close process where most of the time is spent waiting, not working.
The challenge is compounded by what Deloitte calls the SAP skills crisis: 51% of finance leaders report they simply can’t find or retain the SAP talent they need. The knowledge gap isn’t just frustrating—it’s widening, making IT teams the bottleneck for even routine finance operations.
Why Excel Is Part of the Solution, Not the Problem
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: 89% of finance work happens in Excel, not SAP GUI. And that’s actually okay.
Your team already knows Excel inside and out. They’re experts at building models, analyzing data, and presenting insights in the format executives actually want to see.
The problem isn’t that they’re using Excel. It’s that getting SAP data into Excel requires IT intervention, custom ABAP code, or clunky workarounds that break with every system update.
A Different Approach: Empower Finance, Not Just IT
What if your finance team could access, analyze, and update SAP data directly? What if they could do this without writing code, submitting tickets, or compromising data integrity?
That’s exactly what Financial Optimization for SAP enables. Instead of adding to IT’s workload, it removes finance teams from the IT request queue entirely.
Take United Laboratories as an example. By empowering their finance users with self-service access to SAP, they reduced IT dependency by 75% and cut manual effort on journal uploads alone by 85%. The Hackett Group’s research backs this up: top-quartile finance functions operate with 45% fewer IT resources precisely because they’ve empowered business users to work independently.
The Technical Reality That Makes This Possible
Financial Optimization for SAP works within your existing Excel environment—no new interface to learn, no separate system to log into. But behind that familiar spreadsheet is direct connectivity to over 40 SAP General Ledger Update (GLSU) transactions, with access to 1,900+ prebuilt templates for everything from journal entries to master data updates.
This isn’t about bypassing controls. It’s about applying them at the right level. Finance users work in the environment they know best, while IT maintains governance, security, and audit trails at the SAP level.
From 12 Days to 3: What Changes
McKinsey’s 2024 research shows that finance teams using self-service automation reduce close time by 58-67% and errors by 85-95%. Here’s what that transformation actually looks like.
Days 1-3 (Old Process): Waiting for IT to generate reports, adjust queries, and troubleshoot errors.
Days 1-3 (New Process): Finance users pull their own reports, validate data in real-time, and identify variances immediately—all within Excel.
Days 4-8 (Old Process): Submitting journal entry requests, waiting for IT to upload, fixing errors, resubmitting.
Day 3 (New Process): Journal entries uploaded directly by finance users using validated templates. No IT tickets required.
Days 9-12 (Old Process): Final reconciliations, more report requests, last-minute adjustments.
Close complete.
Thinking about connecting SAP and Excel? Check out this brochure first.
Breaking the Bottleneck
The path from a 12-day close to a 3-day close is about removing the structural bottleneck that makes IT the gatekeeper for routine finance operations.
When United Laboratories empowered their finance team with direct SAP access through tools they already knew, they didn’t just speed up the close. They freed their IT team to focus on strategic projects instead of repetitive report requests, reduced errors by 85% through automation, and gave finance leaders the agility to respond to business needs in hours instead of days.
Your SAP skills gap isn’t going to close itself. But your month-end close can—in 3 days instead of 12.
