Cook's PlayBooks
Why it’s time to open the books and reimagine the close.
Jim Cook
Jim Cook is the full-time founder & CEO of BenchBoard.com, a strategic advisory and executive coaching company. He also writes weekly at Cook’s PlayBooks, a Substack for founders, CEOs, COOs, and CFOs focused on lessons learned from scaling companies from series A to IPO. This article originally appeared on Cook’s PlayBooks and is brought to you in partnership with Brex.
A few months ago, I wrote what turned out to be one of my more popular posts titled “The ERP Era Is Over — The New Era = CFO Intelligence Platform.” That post was sparked by the Operators Guild CFO Summit we had just completed with multiple demos and conversations.
I had recently attended the a16z Finance Demo Day, where some of the sharpest new finance tools were on display. Companies like Runway, Sequence, Equals, Concourse, and Metronome showcased what’s possible when real-time data and modern UX meet financial workflows.
In a follow-up conversation with Scott Woody, CEO of Metronome, we got into the topic of how his platform could shave days off the accounting close process. That’s when it hit me:
We’re not just speeding up the close. We’re on the verge of re-architecting the accounting close entirely.
So I asked Scott and the few other people standing around a very curious, first-principle type question:
What’s the true purpose of an accounting close, anyway?
It’s possible the only real answer these days is “Because we’ve always done it that way,” or “It’s GAAP.” PS — those are terrible answers!
Which led to my next question?
Isn’t the purpose of an accounting close to produce “consistent and accurate numbers"?
And then a final few powerful questions, the type of game-changing questions which oftentimes lead to new ways of working:
- How consistent and accurate do we really need our numbers to be to make great business decisions?
- What if our new finance/AI stack is less about AI automation and AI agency and more about re-designing the people-processes-system from the ground up?
- What if we could deliver daily, decision-ready numbers?
- Isn’t it time to make the mental shift from the “C” everyone hates “compliance,” to the new 3C’s of financial data — “continuous, contextual, and confident?
Bottom line: It’s time to reimagine the accounting close
We’ve spent decades perfecting the accounting close: journal entries, reconciliations, trial balances, and GAAP compliance. For most startups and even small to midsize public companies, the reality is this:
Trial balances and balance sheet tie-outs rarely drive real operating decisions.
What the business actually needs is faster daily, weekly, and sometimes hourly decision signals. What we need is:
A “decision close”: fast and focused on driving the next set of operational course corrections, not accounting precision.
This post is about separating those two ideas.
It’s about asking the question most finance teams never stop to consider:
Why do we even have a “close” in the first place?
It’s time to shift our focus from wrapping up the past to creating a more agile financial support team.
From a static “close” to a live, streaming “decision reporting system.”
Redefining the accounting close altogether
The traditional accounting close is a 100-year-old-plus fixed cadence ritual and happens only monthly and quarterly. Today’s accounting close is a legacy of batch-processing systems requiring multiple human interventions and journal entry corrections. But in the age of AI and real-time data infrastructure, here’s the question I’m now asking myself more often:
What if the very definition of an "accounting close" is wrong?
What if, instead of chasing perfection at monthly intervals, we moved to a continuous close model? This close model offers always-on, transparent visibility full of real-time targets and benchmarks to the daily decisions that create the operating activities, which in turn produce these numbers.
Why the current close is a relic
- It's backward-looking. Traditional closes report what already happened at a minimum of 4+ weeks after the fact.
- It's binary. You're either in a close period or not. In a world of continuous business, this creates artificial information silos.
- It's fragile. Errors get discovered too late. Leaders make decisions based on stale or approximated data.
- It’s frustrating and creates performance drag. Teams burn cycles reconciling vs. analyzing, much less fully understanding, and recommendations for next actions
The close as we know it is a myth
Every CFO, controller, and board member has been conditioned to treat “the close” as the starting point for decisions. The heartbeat of finance. The final scorecard. The moment we finally think we know what happened… maybe?
But here’s the question we need to ask as we zoom out while we are building tomorrow’s finance stack.
What if our fixes are focused on fixing an obsolete definition?
Not “We’ll make it faster by streamlining it.”
Not “We’ll fix it by automating it.”
But rather: “How do we build what we really need?”
The idea that we should only understand our financials at the end of a monthly period made sense in a world of manual entries, batch processes, and a much slower-paced decision-making.
In today’s always-on, real-time data world full of AI/ML and system-to-system APIs, and vibe coding, I’m looking at a finance and accounting world that is facing its “Blockbuster” moment.
The new operating model: Continuous close
The new model isn’t monthly. It’s at least weekly with a long-term target of daily.
A continuous close is not just a faster version of your current close. It’s a completely different architecture. One built for daily visibility, contextual insight, operational decision-making, collaboration, and real-time comparisons.
Instead of looking backward once a month, you see change as it happens. Our peer execs are doing some of this today with marketing campaigns, recruiting dashboards, and engineering code commits. We are hamstringing ourselves by relying on our fixed mindset of what the true purpose of ‘closing the books’ actually is.
In this new world of continuous close, we don’t reconcile data after the fact. Our systems and sub-systems alert us to anomalies the moment they emerge and then offer recommendations to fix them quickly.
We no longer package up stale reports in Excel, PDFs, or PowerPoint. We dynamically huddle in daily stand-ups to review the financial data performance by product line, function, geography, etc.
The continuous close is a “rip the band-aid off” systems architecture and CFO leadership mindset shift. Here's what it looks like:
What really matters: Period-over-period insight
In a continuous close world, “periods” are:
- Today vs. yesterday
- This week vs. the same week last year
- This Friday vs. the last 10 Fridays
- Post-product-feature launch vs. pre-product-feature launch
- Region X vs. Region Y in real-time
Along with the data, we bring in the best of narrative collaboration, discussing what the data/numbers mean and creating real-time decision-making situational awareness — a concept I talk about a lot with my clients.
We turn our finance function into the equivalent of a CFO flight cockpit dashboard, providing us, the CFO Pilot, the ability to react in real-time when conditions change.
The holy grail? Period-over-period insight at any granularity.
The end game? Finance becomes what everyone wants but nobody truly gets: the financial operating system of the business.
The requirements for continuous close
- Unified data layer: One source of truth across GL, revenue systems, billing, payroll, and other operational systems/metrics. For those following along these and other posts just this year (2025), this is coming fast.
- Automated reconciliation workflows: (think daily validation, flagged variances, and click-throughs to the source data)
- AI + NLP (Natural Language Processing) for analysis and anomaly detection. Systems that highlight unusual entries or variances without waiting for humans. Unusual spend. Gross Margin anomalies. In 2025, these are the AI Agents that are already arriving in the demos I’m seeing.
- APIs > spreadsheets: APIs have been greater than spreadsheets for nearly 10 years now. Let’s improve these subsystems with real-time ingestion, real-time validation, and data tagging across these systems (with, of course, another AI agent cross-checking that all the “tags” are properly synced across all systems.
- Narrative generation engines & decision forecasting: Your metrics come “pre-explained” with AI surfacing what changed and why it matters. You quickly move from “versionings” of forecasts to continuously monitoring the current decisions driving the operating activities. “Prior Decisions” are now able to be compared/contrasted vs “Current Decisions” and have a real-time set of “Recommended Next Decisions”, each with a “Decision Timestamp” and “Decision Audits.”
4 powerful questions for your finance team
- What changed yesterday? How fast can we know it?
- How many decisions are we making based on last week’s data?
- Do we really need to wait a month to mark the data you control “final”?
- For those data points, what systems, processes do we need to change to “close that data” weekly?
Jim Cook was Intuit’s first head of finance and helped lead their IPO (1993), multiple M&A’s, and scaled their finance teams and systems to a +$4B valuation. He was a founding team member of Netflix, designing all finance and operational functions of the DVD envelope era. Jim also served as CFO of Mozilla. With its 2004 Firefox launch with $2M nonprofit funding to over $500M revenue and cash balance, the Mozilla team re-created the browser market and the subsequent browser wars. During his 30-year career in Silicon Valley, Jim has served as advisor to founders, CEOs, and boards and remains extremely active advising the new finance leadership stack of companies at the forefront of our future — including Brex.