Month-End Close Management System

A large ASX-listed financial services group was running its month-end close across approximately 30 accountants using a shared Excel spreadsheet with over 400 tasks. Simultaneous access caused editing conflicts and slowdowns, and the Group Financial Controller spent significant time manually coordinating teams and chasing progress - with no reliable real-time view of where the close actually stood. Audit sign-off evidence had to be collected and collated manually each year, a process that gave auditors limited confidence that reviews were happening in a timely way.

I designed and built a purpose-built close management system using Jira, Confluence, SQL Server, and PowerBI, integrated via API connections. Tasks were managed in Jira and automatically linked to Confluence documentation pages, created from a standard template at task setup. A PowerBI dashboard gave finance leadership a real-time view of task progress, documentation completion, and sign-off status across all teams - with enough detail to identify bottlenecks without requiring manual coordination. Preparer and reviewer sign-off was captured natively in Jira, creating a timestamped audit trail automatically.

Two years on, the system was handling nearly 1,000 tasks each month - 2.5 times the original volume - as the business continued to grow. Teams operated independently, the Group Financial Controller had oversight without being across every detail, and auditors could review a full, timestamped sign-off history directly in Jira rather than relying on manually assembled evidence.