When an administrator says it 'takes a week to close the month', they are rarely talking about a single task. They are describing a chain of dependencies across 6 to 8 steps — each waiting on the previous one, each fragile whenever an exception appears.
Reducing total time does not come from speeding up one step. It comes from identifying where the queue stalls and what needs to run in parallel.
A typical map of a 5-day close
- 1.D+1: Receipt of positions from the custodian and manual reconciliation.
- 2.D+1 to D+2: Mark-to-market of assets and price validation.
- 3.D+2 to D+3: NAV calculation, management fees, and performance fees.
- 4.D+3: Internal approval of the close.
- 5.D+3 to D+4: Report generation for asset managers and investors.
- 6.D+4 to D+5: Submission of regulatory filings (daily NAV, CDA, Monthly Report).
Where the real bottlenecks are
Across every administrator we talk to, three bottlenecks come up again and again:
1. Manual reconciliation with the custodian
Internal positions do not match custodied positions. The operations team spends hours investigating asset by asset. The solution is not a better spreadsheet — it is an engine that automates the comparison and isolates only the exceptions for human review.
2. Approvals in series, not in parallel
A director reviews the close, then compliance reviews it, then internal audit. Each step in series multiplies lead time. Exception-based, parallel approvals (with a delegation matrix) reduce this significantly.
3. Manual generation of regulatory filings
The team generates a CSV, adjusts it in Excel, exports XML, validates it on the CVM portal, fixes it, resubmits. When the source data is consistent, generation and submission should be automatic.
Cutting the close from 5 to 2 days rarely requires more people. It requires the exception queue to be small enough to be handled in parallel, not in series.
What can be automated today
- ●Multi-clearinghouse reconciliation (B3, Selic, CETIP) with configurable tolerance rules.
- ●Mark-to-market with official sources and automatic validation of outlier prices.
- ●NAV calculation with exception-based approval instead of blanket approval.
- ●Scheduled generation and submission of filings to ANBIMA, CVM, and other bodies.
The rest — investor reports, operational communications, management dashboards — follows the same principle: it runs in the background when the underlying data is right, and requires a human only when there is an exception.
A team at 5 days today does not need to get to 1. Two business days is a realistic, sustainable target — one that frees the team for the work that genuinely requires judgment.