It’s the last day of the month, and the board needs the financials by Monday morning. Welcome to the month-end close-the-books scramble. I’m sure you know this well.
Expense accruals—GL entries that record expenses in the period they are incurred rather than when they are paid—might not be the most exciting part of financial management. But they are critical for painting an accurate picture of your company’s financial health.
Managing accruals is rarely straightforward. Especially when vendors disappear, contracts span multiple periods or invoices remain held in approval workflows, right as the clock ticks down to month-end close.
Most companies still cobble together their accrual process with spreadsheets, emails and educated guesses. Not only is this approach inefficient, but it quietly chips away at business performance in unobvious ways.
High Stress (and High Stakes) When Closing the Books
The average Accounts Payable (AP) team can spend tens of hours every month, almost three entire workdays, chasing down missing expenses and manually tracking accruals in spreadsheets. One wrong formula or misplaced decimal, and forecasts can veer off track. Meanwhile, strategic initiatives that could move the business forward sit untouched while your team plays spreadsheet detective.
Manual processes increase the risk of mistakes. According to a recent Gartner report, 59% of controllers are making several errors per month, and 18% reported making daily mistakes. The number one reason? Increasing workloads and capacity restraints. Manual work only makes these errors more likely to occur, and the time-intensive processes encourage settling for incomplete financials. Many teams, overwhelmed by the workload, only accrue for top vendors or top expenses. Everything else slips through the cracks.
The result? A significant portion of material expenses potentially hit the wrong period, distorting your financial picture and leading to less reliable reporting. This breakdown weakens strategic decisions.
For public companies (or those with IPO or acquisition aspirations), the stakes are even higher. Auditors expect documented rationale behind every accrual estimate, and clumsy processes can raise red flags, compounding into bigger regulatory headaches.
What Does a Better Accrual Process Actually Look Like?
Breaking free from manual cycles requires a new approach.
If your controller leaves tomorrow, your process should not collapse. It needs to be systematic, repeatable and tied directly to the underlying data.
Every accrual estimate should trace back to clear source data: historical spending patterns, open purchase orders and pending approvals. AP teams should know who approved each estimate and how accurate the reporting was after the real invoices are processed.
Most importantly, accruals should be data-driven, not gut-driven. A strong accrual system shouldn’t depend on an A-player’s intuitive sensibilities. As transaction volumes grow, there is simply too much information involved in accruals for manual processing to keep up.
External accrual tools certainly exist but they can bring their own challenges. Syncing large datasets, troubleshooting configuration issues and managing yet another system are all issues that can add to an AP team’s workload, instead of making things easier. This is a process which should reside natively in your ERP, ensuring accruals are built on up-to-date data.
We’re big fans of NetSuite, which is why we built Accrual Automation within our native SuiteApp. This NetSuite-embedded architecture provides secure, direct, instant access to all relevant data. No syncing required. No broken connections. No reconciling disparate systems.
We built our platform to intelligently address real-world challenges:
- Your marketing agency invoices weeks late? Accrual Automation analyzes their historical billing patterns and recommends an accurate accrual.
- That clinical trial contract spanning 18 months? Accrual Automation parses purchase orders and allocates costs across periods automatically.
- Large expense held up in approval workflow? Accrual Automation surfaces this without any extra manual effort.
Since everything remains inside NetSuite, the full audit trail is preserved, satisfying even the strictest auditors.
The Real ROI: Beyond Just Saving Time
Accrual Automation saves time, but having a trusted accrual tool provides additional benefits:
- Strategic Focus: Free your finance team to analyze results instead of scrambling to compile them.
- Better Decisions: Accurate financials lead to smarter business decisions.
- Seamless Scaling: As transaction volumes grow, your process keeps pace without needing extra headcount or longer workdays.
- Audit Confidence: Strong documentation reduces audit risks and inspires trust.
There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself to see if Accrual Automation is right for you:
- How many stressful hours does your team sacrifice to close the books?
- When was the last time someone caught a mistake after financials were finalized?
- Now, imagine your transaction volume increasing by 50%. Would your current process survive, or would it collapse under the strain?
- And most importantly, are you skipping thorough accruals simply because the manual work is too overwhelming?
Your risk exposure may be greater than you realize.
Keep an eye out for our follow-up blog, exploring how finance teams are using accrual automation not just to speed up compliance, but to become strategic business partners. Financial intelligence drives competitive advantage.
At SquareWorks, we help finance teams escape the manual grind and close faster with greater confidence in their numbers. Our NetSuite-native Accrual Automation solution, part of our full Automate AP suite, eliminates the monthly scramble and lays the foundation for smarter financial leadership.
If you want a closer look at how this solution works in NetSuite, check out our on-demand webinar below.
