Practical Lean Finance

Standard DSO moves with revenue, not with how fast customers pay. Countback DSO shows what they actually do. The gap is real cash.

Net working capital as one number hides everything. Decompose it into three levers and three conversations.

Learn five ways to fix upstream dependencies in your month-end close, ranked from permanent elimination to SLA formalization. Real examples from manufacturing and capex.

78% of recurring close overruns trace to systems and upstream handoffs, not people. How to use 5-Whys and fishbone analysis to find structural root causes in your month-end close.

Learn to classify month-end close waste into two families and match the right fix to the right cause. Eight Lean wastes applied to real finance processes.

Your critical path says 11 days. Your close takes 13. The gap is people, not tasks. Here's how to tell whether to fix the schedule or fix the work.

The Critical Path Method puts a number on every task in your close: how much buffer it has, whether it controls your deadline, and where convergence points break your schedule.

Swimlane mapping shows why your close drags: the handoffs between departments, not the tasks. 89 studies found no evidence SSCs reduce total costs.

Binary value classification breaks in finance. The three-way VA/BNVA/NVA split gives compliance work an honest home and exposes where the recoverable hours live.

Most finance teams close without a process map. SIPOC maps every task in five elements. Here's how to apply it to a real 127-task manufacturing close.