For businesses of nearly every size, year-end close isn’t just a compliance milestone; it’s also being used as a strategic lever. Done right, the close compresses time-to-truth, produces actionable insights, and equips leadership to make faster, better reinvestment decisions.
In a recent interview, Patrick Sunday, Chief Accounting Officer at Bottomline, explained how modern B2B accounting teams are converting year-end close from a backward-looking exercise into a forward-leaning playbook, with benefits across the business.
“Managing and balancing speed with precision is something that every accounting organization or finance organization struggles with,” Sunday said in a recent interview. “Executives and decision makers want the results in their hands, like, yesterday."
The goal, he emphasized, is producing clean, accurate results fast, paired with commentary that connects what happened to what needs to happen next.
Why Year-end Close Matters More Today
Year-end is the definitive performance anchor. It finalizes the financial narrative for investors and operators, sets up multi-year comparability, and frames the year ahead.
“Wrapping up the year is like the final curtain call for that particular performance,” Sunday said. “Going through the year-end process solidifies that and says, ‘here’s what actually happened.’"
Crucially, it’s also the reference point for audit readiness and board-level storytelling. Timeliness is non-negotiable. Many accounting teams have a brief window to crunch the numbers and deliver actionable analysis. Most aim within five days of closing the quarter, in fact.
The yardstick of closing the books on the prior year within five days isn’t a magic number, Sunday noted, saying it’s a pragmatic target in today’s systems landscape: fast enough to make a difference, and rigorous enough to trust.
Speed to Insight, Built on Trust
Speed without trust is risky. Sunday said the ideal approach balances fast cycle times with controls that protect accuracy. These include a disciplined reconciliation sequence, clear review paths, and unambiguous close definitions.
But publishing numbers isn’t the finish line; enabling decisions is. Executives are visual consumers, Sunday said, adding that C-suites and boards tend to prefer “highly structured scorecards where outliers jump off the page.”
In practice, effective year-end close packages typically describe and explain:
- What changed: concise explanations of revenue, contribution, and margin variances against plan, forecast, and prior year.
- Why it changed: operational drivers tied to product lines, customer cohorts, and transaction dynamics.
- What to do next: clear implications for quarter-on-quarter priorities, and capital allocation choices that support them.
Turn Production Data and Mix into Strategy
In payments, equations like ‘volume times rate’ aren’t enough to get leaders the insights they need anymore. The real value is in throughput: the product-level, cohort-level, and transaction-level patterns that reveal where your model is working, and where it isn’t.
“It’s about understanding the throughput data, and what exactly are the underlying transactions. That matters," Sunday said.
He urged accounting teams to partner with other business teams on expectation-versus-outcome analysis. If payment volumes were expected to rise 10% but fell 5%, diagnose the root causes (pricing, perceived value, onboarding friction, contract mechanics) and turn that finding into a remedy.
“A lot of accounting organizations feel as though they are simply score keepers,” he said. Today, the function “is about being more of a strategic extension of the business."
Retention as the North Star, and Thoughts on Packaging Insights
In network-driven payments businesses, for example, net retention is often the clearest indicator of durable value. By ‘network,’ we mean the connected community of buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions that transact through a shared payments platform. If high-value cohorts churn or downgrade, network value erodes, even when headline volume looks stable. “A leading indicator of success is net retention,” said Sunday. “If that’s going down, it can signal pressure on the underlying value of the network."
Small operational changes can make an outsized difference here. Sunday cited fee settlement mechanics as an example. Instead of deducting fees on vendor invoices (creating unnecessary surprises), settling fees separately can improve vendor clarity and stickiness. “From the vendor side, it’s cleaner, and more operationally effective,” he said.
When accounting is finished, Sunday said year-end artifacts should be built for executive consumption with scorecards that slice revenue, contribution margin, and mix across plan, forecast, and year-over-year comparators.
The key is to make questions obvious and answers immediate.
“It’s interesting to look at the past because it matters, but [decision-makers] immediately pivot to ‘what does this mean for the future?” he said, adding that year-end close gives all stakeholders clarity and understanding. “We’re there to frame the story," he said.
Cash Forecasting that Enables Reinvestment
Year-end is also the moment to reset the cash view and make reinvestment decisions with conviction. While approaches vary by company and context, “we run a disciplined cash forecasting process designed to inform those decisions,” Sunday said. The close tests assumptions and helps guide choices on capital allocation, whether to service debt and fund growth bets in Research and Development, or in Sales and Marketing.
“There’s an aspect of deploying investment in R&D that’s going to yield revenue reactions different than if we deploy that into sales and marketing,” he said. “What’s going to help drive a certain outcome?”
Accounting “sees” financial signals first, and early enough to shape outcomes and not just record them. “The accounting organization sees things before everybody else,” said Sunday. That prescience has earned accounting “a seat at the table,” he said. “We’re not just delivering the ‘what’ but also the ‘why.’" Done in this way, year-end close becomes a multiplier, not a cost center. It’s a strategic process helping every function drive revenue.
Year-End Close Checklist
- Compress time-to-truth. Aim for a day-five close built on solid controls and ready-to-decide commentary.
- Mine throughput, not just totals. Link product, cohort, and transaction patterns to pricing, packaging, and onboarding.
- Protect retention. Treat fee mechanics and experience design as levers for network stickiness.
- Tie cash to strategy. Use year-end to align R&D and S&M investment with the outcomes the business needs, in the correct order.
“It’s not just adding up dollars and cents,” Sunday said. “In my opinion, year-end close can really provide value that’s going to help every other function drive better revenue results."