In today’s industrial manufacturing landscape, finance leaders are navigating unprecedented complexity. Global supply chain volatility, increasing tariffs, and rising logistics costs collide with the realities of multisite operations, massive ERP ecosystems, and tightening regulatory oversight. For CFOs, Controllers, and finance executives, the challenge isn’t just closing the books on time—it’s ensuring accuracy, visibility, and compliance across millions of high-volume transactions. Spreadsheets and manual workarounds, once sufficient, can no longer keep pace. The result is costly inefficiencies, hidden risks to audit readiness, and margin erosion that directly impact strategic growth. Today, investments in purpose-built financial close automation solutions are less about convenience and more about survival—empowering finance teams to reduce risk, reclaim working capital, and position the enterprise for long-term agility.
For industrial manufacturers, reconciliation complexity is unavoidable. Every day, finance teams manage millions of transactions across inventory, production, and intercompany accounts—volumes that far exceed what spreadsheets or manual tools can reliably handle. When errors and mismatches slip through, the costs add up: rework, delayed closes, and financial exposure.
Financial close automation software directly addresses this challenge by streamlining reconciliations at scale. Instead of spending weeks chasing exceptions and balancing spreadsheets, finance teams can complete reconciliations in days—freeing up capacity for analysis and decision-making. In fact, manufacturers that have adopted financial close solutions report reducing close timelines by up to 50%, while also cutting costly write-offs tied to unreconciled accounts. The result: fewer surprises at period-end, stronger margin protection, and more confidence in financial reporting.
“Since implementing Cadency, we have been able to reduce our overall cost to deliver by some 20% while also dramatically improving the quality and reliability of the output.”
Regulated manufacturing sectors—like aerospace, defense, and transportation—face some of the strictest compliance requirements in business. SOX readiness, industry-specific oversight, and detailed audit trails are all table stakes. Yet when audit documentation is spread across spreadsheets, shared drives, and local systems, finance teams burn countless hours assembling evidence and still risk control gaps.
Solutions purpose-built for the financial close centralize and standardize compliance processes, producing reliable, real-time audit trails that withstand scrutiny. Manufacturers that have implemented close automation report a significant reduction in time spent on audit preparation—often freeing up entire weeks per quarter. The result: more confidence during audits, fewer costly findings, and the ability to redirect finance resources from compliance firefighting to strategic support.
Most large manufacturers run on SAP, Oracle, or Workday. But even the most robust ERP systems weren’t designed to manage the nuanced reconciliation and reporting needs of manufacturing finance at scale. Native ERP functionality often falls short—forcing teams into costly customizations or manual workarounds that create more risk than they resolve.
Financial close software bridges these gaps by layering on top of existing ERPs. With seamless integration, finance teams gain real-time visibility, flexible reconciliation capabilities, and exception management tools without expensive ERP customization projects. Manufacturers that have invested in these solutions report major reductions in manual workload and fewer delays in financial reporting, helping them keep pace with business demands.
“We have our ERP integrated into [Trintech]…which has saved our team a significant amount of time and has reduced our overall risk. In addition, our Auditors also have access to [Trintech], so they are able to access all the information they need in one place, eliminating the need for our team to spend time manually compiling that data for them.”
4. Intercompany Reconciliations: Centralizing Data for a Faster, Cleaner, More Confident Close
Global manufacturers manage hundreds of plants, warehouses, and business units, each with its own reporting timelines and local processes. This operational sprawl leads to inconsistent practices, bottlenecks, and limited visibility at the corporate level.
Financial close software helps standardize workflows across all sites, creating a single source of truth for intercompany reconciliation and reporting. Instead of waiting weeks for local teams to close and consolidate, finance can monitor progress in real time, identify issues early, and ensure global consistency. Organizations that use Trintech to modernize their intercompany processes have seen the following results:
Reduce time spent on journal entry adjustments by up to 75%
Reduce time spent researching exceptions by up to 75%
Reduce write-offs due to cash shortages by up to 76%
5. Reduce Write-Offs and Working Capital Risk
Few issues hit the bottom line as directly as write-offs. Inaccurate reconciliations, delayed postings, and unaddressed mismatches often lead to unnecessary adjustments to inventory or receivables—directly eroding profitability.
With financial close automation, finance leaders gain early anomaly detection and tighter control over high-risk accounts. This means fewer missed adjustments, stronger protection against financial leakage, and a more accurate view of working capital. Manufacturers that have adopted these solutions reduce write-offs by as much as 62%, while also improving visibility into cash positions, strengthening their ability to support strategic investments and M&A activity.
6. Logistics and Freight Accounting: Avoid Hidden Cost Leakage
For industrial manufacturers, logistics is more than a line item—it’s a core cost driver. Freight invoices often come with discrepancies between quoted and billed amounts, and manual allocation of shipping costs across products, plants, or customers leaves plenty of room for error. Left unchecked, these discrepancies quietly inflate costs and undermine profitability.
Financial close software purpose-built for manufacturing brings control to this overlooked area. By reconciling freight invoices automatically and applying precise allocation logic, finance teams can identify overpayments, prevent duplicate charges, and ensure accurate cost distribution. Manufacturers implementing automated freight reconciliation report significant reductions in invoice discrepancies and measurable improvements in margin protection.
Additionally, rising global tariffs and shifting trade policies are compounding the volatility of logistics expenses. Manufacturers require a real-time view into these charges to avoid misstating their cost of goods sold and to understand the impacts changing tariffs have on their bottom line.
How to Build a Strong Business Case
When presenting financial close automation to leadership, clarity and quantifiable impact are key. Focus your business case on these four points:
Quantify Time Savings – Assess how much time your close takes each month and quantify the value of cutting that time in half.
Highlight Risk Reduction – Look at your organization’s write-off expenses for the past year and assess the business impact of what a 60%+ reduction in those costs could mean. If compliance and audit preparedness is a struggle, quality the value of time saved and potential cost of compliance fines.
Demonstrate Working Capital Impact – Connect faster reconciliations and anomaly detection to improved visibility into cash flow, freeing capital for strategic investments.
Show Strategic Value – Position the solution as an enabler of M&A readiness, tariff navigation, and enterprise agility—not just operational efficiency.
From Efficiency to Strategic Agility
Ultimately, the case for financial close software in manufacturing finance isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about equipping CFOs and Controllers to navigate global complexity with confidence. By reducing reconciliation risk, streamlining audit readiness, and protecting working capital, close solutions position the finance function as a strategic partner to the business. Unlike spreadsheets, in-house workarounds and ERP tools, Trintech’s solution for mid-size organizations and our platform for large enterprises are purpose-built to address the challenges and complexities manufacturers face during their financial close. (Learn how)
The message is clear: the cost of inaction isn’t just inefficiency—it’s lost margin, increased compliance risk, and diminished agility in preparing for M&A or IPO. With financial close automation, finance leaders can transform their close process from a reactive burden into a proactive driver of growth and resilience.
“[Trintech] has been a welcomed addition to our team. The software really is easy to use, as are the pre-built dashboards. When you are looking at purchasing a solution, it is natural to think that the solution is too good to be true, but I’m here to say that [Trintech] is really that great!”
