A working proposal for Northwind's finance team, prepared after our March 18 discovery session with Priya, Daniel, and the controllership group.
Today, the Northwind close runs five business days. Three of those days are intercompany reconciliation across NetSuite, QuickBooks, and the legacy Velo ERP. Two senior accountants spend roughly 32 hours each on this in any given close, much of it in shared spreadsheets that no one trusts after edits compound.
The Velo acquisition added a third ledger with no shared chart of accounts. Manual mapping happens during close, not before, and the team flags 40 to 60 reconciliation breaks each month. Roughly 15 of those require formal journal adjustments after the period has closed.
The CFO's stated concern, captured in your last board pack, is that this pattern is incompatible with the August audit readiness commitment.
Your Big-Four readiness audit begins August 18. To present a clean close to the audit team, the new process needs to run two full cycles in production. That makes June 1 the practical drop-dead for going live, and April 21 the practical drop-dead for signing.
What your team actually does in the new close. Ledgerline runs continuously; the team only touches exceptions.
Three source ledgers, one Ledgerline workspace, posting back to system of record. Connectors are read-only by default; posting credentials are scoped per entity and rotate quarterly.
Your IT team controls connector setup. Posting credentials live in your secrets vault, not ours. We never store ledger data outside your customer-managed encryption keys.
Five phases, named owners, explicit effort from your side. Your total team commitment is roughly 38 hours across eight weeks, concentrated in weeks two through five.