Why is month-end closing so painful? (A data engineer’s perspective)
Hi all,
I work on the data engineering side of NetSuite building pipelines, transformations, and reporting layers but I’m not an accountant myself.
One thing I keep noticing on the floor and on the calls that every accountant, Financial Controller, and CFO I’ve worked with dreads month-end close. I can see their stress
So I am just curious to know - is month-end closing inherently painful, or is it painful because of how NetSuite (or the surrounding tooling) is set up?
From the data side, I see things like:
- Manual data pulls and Excel reconciliations that could be automated
- Reporting that doesn’t quite match what finance actually needs
- Delays caused by data sitting in silos across systems
But I don’t fully understand the accounting logic behind why certain steps are hard.
If you’ve lived through painful closes (please share your experience) what’s the real bottleneck? Is it the process, the system, or the data?
Asking because I want to understand where engineering can genuinely help, not just build pipelines nobody asked for and is it even possible to solve this with data engineering or it is just an black box like AI