How finance leaders create calm

Proactively strategize a year-end strategy

Building a resilient Q4 resourcing plan means going beyond headcount alone: it’s about designing for agility so you can flex up or down as financial priorities emerge. 

Hire interim controllers, SOX specialists, or reconciliations experts to relieve pressure and maintain pace without long hiring cycles or permanent overhead. Highspring’s Agility Index finds that only 31% of enterprise organizations can quickly find the right skills to meet new challenges.

Organizations that align talent strategies with their business objectives are 12% more likely to remain profitable and respond to market shifts. Having a dedicated partner who understands your business context provides instant capacity and expertise right where you need it.

Stabilize execution with dependable, cost-effective resources

Outsource routine work such as reconciliations, payroll, invoice processing, or reporting to eliminate bottlenecks and maintain high accuracy. This frees your core team to focus on high-value projects and analysis, all without increasing headcount or fixed costs. The result is a more agile organization: you scale up capacity as needed, keep operations lean, and empower your experts to drive transformation, not just transactions.

Embed audit readiness year-round

Don’t wait for external audit season. Build continuous controls and documentation into monthly close routines to eliminate last-minute crises. Embed audit readiness by integrating documentation into every step of your monthly and year-end close. Best-in-class organizations create continuous controls by documenting processes, owners, exceptions, and approvals as part of routine operations. This proactive stance transforms an audit from a fire drill into a predictable checkpoint, and is a signature of high-agility teams who learn, adapt, and improve through each cycle.

Leverage automation & AI-enhanced tools

A successful digital transformation rests on reliable, standardized data architecture. Despite the hype around digital tools, the real differentiator is having the operational discipline to clean and standardize data beforehand. Organizations that prepare their data are ensuring accuracy, consistency, and accessibility that can unlock the true power of automation, AI, and continuous close. Data readiness is the first step toward effective transformation. Without it, technology investments fall flat.

• • About 31% of organizations actively use AI in record-to-report processes, with another 39% in early stages of adoption. (CFO)
• • High-performing teams (top 25th percentile) close year-end in 10 days or less—nearly double the speed of average performers. (CFO)

Free your team to focus on strategic finance initiatives

With operational burden lifted, your team can turn its attention to high-impact work like FP&A, ERP upgrades, carveouts, reporting enhancements, or M&A without last-minute scrambles. Shifting capacity this way ensures that critical projects get the focus and expertise they deserve, driving greater business value and more confident financial leadership.