3 Financial Close Tips to Improve Your Work-Life Balance

Unsurprisingly, the financial close is the most stressful period of an accountancy team’s job. Accounting professionals take more sick time in March than any other month of the year, taking on average 17 hours of sick leave compared to 11 hours in other months. People calling in sick can then make a stressful period even more challenging; particularly if like most organizations you have limited accounting experts. There are additional things you can do to make you and your co-workers’ lives easier during a close.

3 Financial Close Tips For an Improved Work-Life Balance

1. Work Together to Define What Success Looks Like

Keeping your employees engaged and productive during closing periods is vital to the process’s success. Research also suggests that the best way to engage people is to work together to develop and deliver a collaborative vision of what success looks like.

2. Be Transparent

Research we conducted with financial professionals suggests that a lack of transparency is one of the key issues teams struggle with during the financial close. It’s understandable that people feel concerned and stressed about doing a good job if they are unable to understand the whole process or see the bigger picture behind their particular role within it.

3. Encourage Healthy Habits and Extra-Curricular Activities

During busy times like this, healthy habits and extra-curricular activities are some of the first things people cancel in order to get the job done. It’s important that all team leads encourage their colleagues — and themselves — to make time for them.

These three tips can drastically help finance and accounting professionals tackle each month-end close. Download the tip sheet to read these tips in greater detail.