Achieving continuous close: A 2025 guide for US CFOs

The month or year-end close traditionally helps you ensure the accuracy of your financial accounts and compliance with regulations. Reviewing, reconciling and verifying all ledger entries for the past year or month not only helps you serve the interests of investors and regulators but also helps you and your leadership team make better, more insightful decisions.

So far, so good, right? Robust financial data means you’re ready for audit, books are settled, and you know where you stand financially. But not, however, if you’re closing the books manually. By manually closing your month, you could be inviting challenges, including guesswork, error, miscommunication, and burnout.

The most common challenges include:

• Incorrect or late data and unidentified breakdowns in the collection process
• Human error, including omissions, duplications, and transpositions, as well as errors related to entry reversals or other closing activities
• Disconnected multiple systems, leaving you with an opaque view over spend and manual workarounds

What is continuous close?

Continuous close or continuous accounting involves using digital technology to track and reconcile your business's financial activity as it happens, often involving automation and integrated software.

It treats every day as the day the books need to be closed. Typically, it involves technology that allows all transactions to be entered into the journal as they occur, plus automatic reconciliations, ensuring consistent and error-resistant processes.

And the importance of closing your month and getting up-to-date data? It goes beyond the vital financial visibility you need for your business growth; it can make up a crucial part of company reporting in the US, too.

For example:

• Regulators require interim reports, but how often those should be issued as a matter of law is an open question, say the experts at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
• The US Securities and Exchange Commission has mandated quarterly reports since 1970. Even so, it was just six years ago that Washington toyed with the idea of eliminating the requirement to file a "10Q"
• Then, in the UK, British officials recently considered introducing quarterlies, according to the CFA Institute but went back to the every-six-months protocol

The point is that there's nothing sacred about the frequency of interim reporting, and there's nothing to be gained by leaving it until the last minute.

Getting continuous close right

At Payhawk, we've been helping customers find their way to continuous close for years. The key parts of the process include:

• Receipt and invoice capture with OCR technology — and expense coding via custom fields and dropdowns — ensuring that data is accurate and in the right pot
• Seamless synchronization with solutions like Microsoft Business Central, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, and more. At Payhawk, we've built our real-time integrations in accordance with the accounting accruals concept, meaning data flows between the two systems and is always up to date

So, how does this look in practice? While each customer is at a different point in their growth journey, we have still found a way to guide them toward an improved closing. Take, for example, the e-commerce company Heroes. Giancarlo Bruni, CFO at Heroes, shares:

One reason we picked Payhawk was because of the accounting and ERP integrations. When we first started using Payhawk, we were still using Xero, which was seamless. So, we trusted Payhawk to help us achieve the same with the NetSuite integration. We wanted everything to flow into the ERP and knew that Payhawk would be a true scaling partner in this way. We use our ERP across all our departments. … It's relevant for every single department.

Meanwhile, international fintech Essentia Analytics (which focuses on behavioral economics) now spends half the time it once did on month-end close.

Carolina Einarsson, Finance Director at Essentia Analytics, says:

Saving time with Payhawk is a game changer; we've even been able to allocate resources to revenue-impacting teams — we now have a finance employee who spends 50 % of her time supporting as [a sales development rep]."

Parsing expenses into categories at the point of purchase can have profound benefits. Take digital events company the GDS Group, which has used it to streamline its accounting functions.

Nick Millard, VP of Finance of GDS Group, describes:

As we have all of our expenses coded up to project codes in the Payhawk solution, we can now report on our margins by event and so on at the end of each month. Payhawk has done a great job of ensuring that we can get that custom field from NetSuite and the project code from NetSuite into Payhawk.

Different businesses have different needs, but one major outcome remains the same: Real-time data is needed for better decisions (and no manic month-end).

How Payhawk gives you continuous close capability

Migrating from month-end close to continuous close is only as streamlined as the software you choose to bring it to life. And while the process can be as intricate as any business process transformation, there are straightforward ways to make it a reality (with the right support and tech).

Before the new environment can enable you, you must enable it.

Link a card

Link eligible non-Payhawk corporate cards to Payhawk and issue virtual cards complete with controls and expense management via the solution (including the app and OCR for spending employees). Make spending easier and more secure — and say goodbye to manual work with real-time ERP integrations.

Expense categories & integrations

To achieve continuous close, you need to start with clear expense categories. And at Payhawk, we give you complete visibility into your business spend exactly the way you need. We’ll tailor expense categories for you; all you need to do is let us know what works for your needs. Do you want to track expenses by function? By line of business? By project?

Often, a good place to start is the headings on your statement of cash flows—operations, capital, and financing—and then break it down from there. Our solution is flexible enough to accommodate whatever most closely maps to your business.

We advise our customers to organize their data so that they can filter expenses and payments by fields such as service period, approval status, and expense categories. Using custom fields to map classes and track expense categories can give any multi-entity enterprise a faster path to accounting close.

Andrew Jacobi, VP of US Finance at State of Play Hospitality, says:

We rely on the customizable class settings within Payhawk to distinguish between venues to analyze performance. Whether it's categorizing between venues or categorizing it into the right general ledger code, it's extremely helpful in terms of how we allocate spend."

In order to even begin establishing processes that would allow continuous close, you have to start with well-defined business expense types.
George Kutnerian, CEO and co-founder at Wellpointe Inc., says:

Payhawk's continuous close capability means that our financial data is always up to date, letting us make more informed decisions!

Clearly, continuous close is not just a stress buster but also vital for budgeting / FP&A, good decision-making, and agility.

Reducing risk

Another big benefit of continuous close is improving security and lowering risk. This includes having a valid audit trail that covers the sequence of events tracing each payment back to the inception of a specific transaction.

A well-routinized audit trail not only helps highlight and correct errors as they occur, but it’s also one of the best anti-fraud devices your company can have. And, of course, ensuring compliance with accounting standards and tax regulations is vital. This only gets more complicated for a U.S.-based company when it moves into a country that charges a value-added tax (VAT).

At Payhawk, we help by offering solutions that give the finance team visibility into expenses as they’re incurred on corporate cards, as well as OCR images of the receipts and invoices. All the while, the expense management software records and timestamps the entire process. The more of this you can automate, the faster you’ll be able to close the books.

Workflows

The key to making workflows efficient is to standardize them, and we have a comprehensive workflow design and automation features that do just that.

You can use our Workflow Designer to set up customized approval flows for different expense categories. It routinizes complex workflows, so invoice and purchase order approvals go through faster. You set the triggers, conditions, and resulting actions, and the system does the rest.

While we’ll always steer our customers toward greater automation, we recognize that’s not always possible. Excel is too hard to break up with. Fortunately, Payhawk has a workaround.

At Payhawk, our Template Builder bridges the gap. This means you no longer need to create and edit the data after the export. Instead, Payhawk’s tool guides you in creating your own .xlsx or CSV template from which you can consistently export your data in a standard form that’s t easy to share, digest and import directly into other financial systems. This is just the ticket to real-time reconciliation, a requirement for continuous close.

Put continuous close to work

Closing the year — or even the month — is a team sport, and you can’t expect to do it alone at this level. At the very least, you need someone to check your sums.

American companies have unique challenges at the end of every reporting period. While manual entry errors and failures to reconcile happen all around the world, only U.S.-based firms need to contend with how the Internal Revenue Service might react to seemingly minor inconsistencies in Forms 940, 941 or 943.

Then, of course, there’s the maze of state tax liabilities that could multiply your headaches by 50.

As the days grow shorter, so does your window of opportunity to adopt continuous accounting meaningfully this year. Still, this is precisely the time to plan and budget for next year. All you have to do to get the ball rolling is to request a demo. Or check here to find out more about linking your existing American Express Card to Payhawk.