"Our close takes 10 days" tends to get said the way people mention a mildly annoying commute — an accepted inconvenience, not a cost anyone has actually put a number on. When you do put a number on it, using nothing more exotic than headcount, time, and a loaded hourly rate, the total tends to be larger than most finance leaders expect. Here's how to calculate it for your own team, with every assumption made explicit.
Why "10 days" sounds fine until you cost it out
Ten calendar days is roughly two working weeks out of every month spent partly or fully on close-related tasks: reconciliations, journal entries, review cycles, and status meetings. Framed as "10 days," it sounds like a scheduling detail. Framed as a dollar figure, it's usually a number CFOs haven't seen written down before — because nobody bills the close internally the way they'd bill a project.
The assumptions behind this calculation
To be clear about what follows: these are illustrative, explicitly labeled assumptions for a hypothetical 50-person finance team, not a measured figure from any specific company. Swap in your own numbers and the output will change accordingly.
- Finance team size: 50 people
- Blended, fully-loaded hourly cost per person: $65/hour (salary plus benefits and overhead)
- Share of each person's time consumed by close-related work during the 10-day close window: 30% on average across the team (some roles are close-intensive for the full 10 days, others touch it for a day or two)
- Standard working day: 8 hours
The math
50 people × 10 working days × 8 hours × 30% close-time allocation = 1,200 hours of close-related labor per close cycle.
1,200 hours × $65/hour = $78,000 in fully-loaded labor cost, per monthly close.
Annualized across 12 monthly closes: roughly $936,000 a year — before counting the cost of a quarter-end or year-end close, which typically run longer and pull in more people outside the core finance team.
That figure is direct labor only. It doesn't include the harder-to-quantify costs: delayed access to management information during the close window, the opportunity cost of finance staff not doing forward-looking analysis, or the rework cost when a late-discovered error forces part of the close to be redone.
What a faster close is actually worth
Using the same assumptions, consider a close cut from 10 days to 4 days — a 60% reduction, at the upper end of the 40–60% close-duration reduction PayConnect customers typically report from combining process redesign with automation. That reduces the close-time allocation proportionally. Run the same 50-person, $65/hour team through a 4-day close and the fully-loaded labor cost drops to roughly $31,200 per cycle, or about $374,400 a year: a difference of over $560,000 in labor cost alone, before counting the value of two extra weeks a month of earlier access to closed numbers.
Run the numbers for your own team
The exact multiplier will differ for every finance organization — team size, close length, and the share of time genuinely consumed by close work all vary. The method is what matters: multiply headcount by close days by hours by the share of time genuinely consumed by close work, then apply your own blended loaded rate. It's a five-minute calculation that tends to change how a close-length conversation gets prioritized at the leadership level.