A slow financial close doesn’t just delay reporting—it stalls decision-making across the business. If your team is stuck chasing numbers across spreadsheets or pulling data manually from your ERP, it’s hard to stay ahead.
The risks go beyond wasted time. Manual processes open the door to errors, compliance issues, and limited visibility when you need it most.
Financial close software solves this by helping teams move faster, collaborate better, and build trust in the numbers. Whether you’re preparing for audits, supporting leadership, or trying to scale your processes, the right platform can make a big difference.
In this guide, we’ve rounded up 12 of the best financial close tools available today, with a breakdown of what each one does well—and where it might fall short.
The financial close is the process of closing your books—on a recurring basis, such as monthly, quarterly or annually—to report on your business’s true financial performance.
During this process, finance teams reconcile account balances, investigate discrepancies, and adjust journal entries as needed. Once complete, the finalized data is used to produce financial statements, audit materials, and other internal or regulatory reports.
Two key steps within the financial close process are account reconciliation and financial consolidation.
Account reconciliation involves matching your general ledger balances to internal and external records to ensure accuracy. Without a clear process in place, teams risk reporting errors, compliance issues, and even undetected fraud.
For multi-entity organizations, consolidation is another layer. It involves combining the financials of multiple subsidiaries into a single, unified financial report. Without it, the organization’s overall financial performance remains unclear and incomplete.
Together, account reconciliation and consolidation provide the foundation for accurate, timely reporting. They help strengthen internal controls, protect your assets, and improve transparency across your organization.
Now let's look at some of the top financial close management solutions on the market.
The right financial close solution can also help you manage tasks across the many team members involved in the financial close process—the various inputs and approvals that usually clog up your inbox and lead to endless versions of the same Excel file.
Many financial planning and analysis platforms weren’t built with the financial close in mind, so when choosing a solution, it’s important to look for how the solution can build custom workflows for how your company uniquely manages its consolidations and eliminations.
Native Microsoft Excel User Interface
Work directly in Excel with full support for formatting, custom formulas, and a familiar user experience.
Collaboration and Sharing
Tag team members, add comments, and collaborate seamlessly—without leaving Excel.
Central Database
A unified platform with a central architecture, built for low-maintenance system management.
Integrations
Connects natively to major GL, ERP, and CRM systems, with API access to hundreds of other data sources.
Process Management
Visual workflows to manage inputs, rules, reviews, and reporting across your entire process.
Security and Compliance
Built-in security model with full auditability and access controls.
Modeling
Unified financial and operational data models for budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
Embedded BI Capabilities
Industry-leading business intelligence tools for built-in reporting and real-time insights.
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Fluence is an out-of-the-box, no-coding software designed for financial consolidation, close, and reporting. It offers a full Excel interface and is tailored for midmarket businesses. Vena and Fluence have a strategic partnership to provide a unified solution for business planning and financial close.
OneStream is a software platform which integrates financial consolidation, planning, reporting, and data management into a single application.
4. Prophix
Prophix is a software solution that specializes in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), helping organizations automate and streamline budgeting, forecasting, reporting and financial consolidation processes.
Blackline is a software solution designed to automate and streamline processes such as financial close management, account reconciliations, inter-company transactions and journal entries.
FloQast is a software solution that provides collaborative close management for financial teams, aiming to improve collaboration, reduce errors and streamline the close process.
CCH Tagetik is a software company specializing in corporate performance management solutions that provides financial planning, budgeting, consolidation and reporting functionalities.
Planful offers cloud-based financial planning and analysis (FP&A) solutions, enabling organizations to streamline budgeting, forecasting, financial consolidation and reporting processes.
Board is a software platform that provides integrated business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) solutions. These combine planning, forecasting, reporting, consolidation (including financial close) and analytics capabilities to support decision making and performance management across the business.
Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud is a cloud-based solution specifically designed to enhance the financial close process, aiming to minimize risk, ensure process transparency and deliver accurate results to streamline consolidation and close activities.
Datarails is a software company specializing in budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation and reporting solutions. The software aims to automate the collection, consolidation and analysis of financial data from various sources, helping to ensure accuracy and compliance.
Cube is an FP&A platform that integrates with your existing spreadsheet to provide access to real-time financial and operational data, enabling faster and more strategic planning, reporting, and analysis.
Managing the financial close process manually can be exceptionally challenging due to the effort involved in aggregating data from all your sources (such as your ERP, GL and subledgers) and coordinating inputs and approvals from your various team members.
Without a dedicated software to manage all the supporting processes involved in the financial close, you’ll not only waste precious time, but you’re also much more likely to encounter errors, reporting inconsistencies, and compliance issues.
Adopting a financial close management software can address these challenges and improve accuracy, efficiency and compliance.
Let’s dig into these benefits further:
The faster you complete the financial close, the faster you can put those numbers to work for important functions like forecasting. But if you’re tediously aggregating and updating your actuals for every reporting period, closing the books early becomes virtually impossible.
When managing the closing process manually, you waste valuable time scouring spreadsheets and external systems for the numbers and documents you need, copying and pasting to roll financials forward and keeping track of all those templates. If you’re a multi-entity organization, then your financial close is much more complicated and time-consuming when performed manually.
Financial close solutions standardize and streamline your account reconciliation and financial consolidation processes to accelerate your close time. They typically provide features for:
This all helps you prevent discrepancies that lead to wasted time on reviews and helps you secure approvals for your journal entries faster.
With financial close management software, your business can report on its financials quicker, enabling your leaders to make better informed decisions before your competitors do.
If you’re performing your financial close processes manually or through offline spreadsheets, it’s inevitable your data will suffer inaccuracies from human error. A single incorrect number can misguide your analysis and decisions as you manually enter data from various systems, convert currencies, and make manual adjustments.
Financial close software tools automate your data mapping with integrations between your ERP and your General Ledger and sub-ledgers. They pull data from your disparate sources—such as your separate chart of accounts—to streamline and consolidate data into one data model. This establishes a single source of truth and guarantees data accuracy, giving your decision makers data they can trust.
By centralizing your financial information to one platform, you can also:
This increased transparency instills greater confidence in your reporting from your stakeholders.
The right financial close solution can also help you manage tasks across the many team members involved in the financial close process—the various inputs and approvals that usually clog up your inbox and lead to endless versions of the same Excel file.
Many financial planning and analysis platforms weren’t built with the financial close in mind, so when choosing a solution, it’s important to look for how the solution can build custom workflows for how your company uniquely manages its consolidations and eliminations.
To make data-driven decisions with certainty, you need visibility into your business’s true financial health sooner. And the way to get there is with a faster financial close.
Without a financial close solution, important decisions may be informed by outdated, untrustworthy data—made with little to no confidence—by your leaders. This compromises your overall strategy as you’ll be reacting to stale data and won’t be able to maintain the agility needed in today’s complex business environment.
A financial close solution enables you to make strategic decisions sooner by closing the books faster and with confidence. It can also enable you to scale efficiently, when the platform can be customized to how your business uniquely manages its financial close process.
Take Idaho-based pet health and wellness company PetIQ, for instance. After adopting Vena for financial close management, the company moved from closing their months on the 24th to closing on the 12th, achieving a remarkable 12-day improvement. The time saved has allowed them to generate a consolidated balance sheet, providing actionable insights across the business at a much faster pace.
To outpace and remain ahead of your competitors, you need to close faster and with more accuracy. Adopting financial close management software is a critical step in making that happen.
To make data-driven decisions with certainty, you need visibility into your business’s true financial health sooner. And the way to get there is with a faster financial close.
The financial close process involves closing your books on a recurring basis for every reporting period. The business standard is closing at the end of every fiscal month and every fiscal year. Every financial close process involves reviewing and reconciling account balances, documenting and investigating discrepancies and adjusting journal entries.
Adopting a financial close software can improve the accuracy, efficiency and compliance of your financial statements, audits or regulatory and management reports.
A financial close software enables you to report your business’s true financial performance.
By using financial close software, organizations can standardize and streamline their closing procedures, reduce manual efforts, minimize errors, and expedite the entire closing process, whether it occurs monthly or annually. This enhances overall financial control and transparency, providing stakeholders with timely and accurate financial information for decision-making and reporting purposes.