It is the seventh working day of the month. The owner of a hotel group is asking for last month's numbers, and the finance manager still cannot give them. Two supplier statements do not match. A batch of commissions has not been recorded. Someone is still hunting for the refund that a corporate client says was paid three weeks ago.
Nobody on that team is careless. They are simply doing a month's worth of checking in a few days, because most of it waited until the month was over.
That is the real problem with a slow month-end close. The close is not slow. The month before it was quiet.
How long a close should take
Benchmarks vary by company size and complexity, but they give a useful reference point. APQC benchmark data, summarised by Numeric, puts the median monthly close at about six calendar days. Top performers finish in under five. The slowest organisations take ten days or more.
Travel and hospitality businesses often sit at the slower end, and for understandable reasons. The work involves many suppliers, many currencies, refunds that arrive weeks after a cancellation, and commissions that depend on stays and tickets being confirmed first.
Why travel and hotel closes run long
Most delays come from the same few places:
- Supplier statements that arrive late and do not match your booking records.
- Refunds and cancellations that sit open because nobody is sure whether the money has come back.
- Commissions and incentives that need confirming before they can be recorded.
- Settlement reports, such as the IATA Billing and Settlement Plan, that must be reconciled before each remittance.
- Manual journals and spreadsheets that only one person knows how to update.
None of these are month-end tasks in nature. They are daily and weekly tasks that have been allowed to pile up.
Hotels feel a version of this every month. Guest ledgers, city ledger balances, travel agent commissions and supplier payables all need to agree before the owner's report can go out. Corporate travel companies face the same pressure from the other side, with client invoices, airline settlements and hotel payments that all have to line up. In both cases, a single unmatched item can hold up the whole report.
As an illustration, a travel company that records supplier invoices only at month-end might receive two hundred of them in the last week. Matching each one against bookings, at a few minutes per invoice, adds up to more than a full day of work before any real closing has begun.
Move the work into the month
The fastest closes are not the result of working harder in the first week. They come from doing more of the checking while the month is still running.
Daily: record invoices as they arrive, match payments to bookings and log anything that does not match.
Weekly: reconcile bank accounts, chase open refunds and review supplier balances for your largest partners.
Month-end: finish accruals, review exceptions, close the books and prepare the report.
When most items are already matched by the last day of the month, the close becomes a review rather than an investigation. Our guide to building a better exception queue explains how to keep the mismatches visible while there is still time to fix them.
Give every task an owner and a date
A month-end close usually fails at the handovers. Someone is waiting for a statement, someone else is waiting for that person, and the deadline passes quietly.
Write the close down as a simple calendar. List every task, who owns it, which working day it is due and what it depends on. For example: bank reconciliations by day one, supplier statements by day two, accruals by day three, review on day four, report on day five.
Keep the list short enough that people actually use it. If a task has no owner, it will be done last. Our guide to writing an SOP someone can actually work from covers how to document each step so anyone on the team can pick it up.
Fix the data before it reaches finance
Many closing problems start far away from the finance team. A booking entered with the wrong client code. A hotel stay recorded twice. A refund logged as a new sale.
Each one takes a few seconds to create and an hour to find later. Agree simple rules for how bookings, refunds and supplier details are recorded, and check a sample of new entries every week. The guide to data entry quality checks shows how to set those rules without slowing the front office down.
Measure the close itself
You will only improve what you can see. Track a few numbers every month:
- Days to close: from the last day of the month to a signed-off report.
- Open reconciling items: how many mismatches remain on day one of the close.
- Late adjustments: entries made after the books were supposed to be final.
- Overtime hours: a quiet signal of how much the close really costs your team.
Review them for three months before changing too much at once. Our article on operations metrics that matter explains how to keep this measurement light.
Decide what your team should own
Not every closing task needs your most senior finance person. Recording invoices, matching statements, chasing refunds and preparing reconciliations are careful, repeatable work. Approving adjustments, judging unusual items and explaining the results to owners are not.
Keep judgement with your finance lead, and move the steady daily work to a trained team that does it every day. That is often the single biggest change, because it turns the month-end rush into a routine that runs all month. Our guide on what to hand over first, and what to keep walks through how to make that decision safely.
A simple place to start
For your next close, note every task that was waiting on something else, and what it was waiting for. The list will usually point to two or three bottlenecks, often supplier statements and open refunds.
Fix those first. Move them into a weekly routine, give them an owner, and measure the close again next month. Most teams see the first days come off without any new software at all. The bigger change is cultural: once the team sees a calm close, nobody wants to go back to the old fire drill.
Dhiti supports corporate travel and hotel businesses with accounts and finance, back-office operations, reporting and sales support, with more than 200 trained specialists. If your month-end feels like a fire drill, we would be glad to help.
Examples and suggested targets are illustrative, not Dhiti client results or contractual commitments. Adapt the approach to your process, risk and team.
