Controller departed mid-close. We stabilised the function and rebuilt the process from scratch.

A controller departure is rarely the only problem. By the time EasePro came on board, four issues were already compounding — each one making the others harder to recover from.

• Open close stalled mid-month. The month-end close was already underway when the controller departed. The journal entries in flight, the reconciliations partway through, the review steps waiting for sign-off — all of it stopped. By the time we came on board, the close was overdue and the trail to pick up each step was starting to go cold.
• Prior month unclosed. The prior month had been put through the close process but never finalised. Review and sign-off were sitting in the departed controller's queue. Without those final steps, the prior month was effectively in limbo — not closed, not open, not auditable. Two periods were now in trouble at once.
• No documentation. No checklist. No calendar. No handover. The close lived in the controller's head. There was no written close calendar, no journal entry template library, no checklist of recurring reconciliations, no documentation of intercompany or accrual methodology. The institutional knowledge of how the close ran had left the building with the controller.
• Incoming controller with no roadmap. The business had brought in a controller to keep things moving. Smart, capable, willing — but with no map. Every question they asked had no documented answer. They were trying to operate a close process they had never seen, against books that were two periods behind.

The headline problem was the backlog. The structural problem was that the close had never been documented. Both had to be fixed, and the sequence mattered. Triage and rebuild had to run in parallel: we could not pause the close to document the process because the books were already too far behind, and we could not document the process without running it because the working knowledge only exists when the work is being done. The fix was to do both at once — run the close, write down every step as it happened, and install a task system that captured the cadence in real time. The documentation was built for the controller already in the seat, written for someone who needed to run the close without having seen it before. We built four deliverables:

• Open-close triage — immediate. Got the open close to a defensible state within days. Picked up the in-flight journal entries, completed the partial reconciliations, reviewed the work the departed controller had done, and produced a closeable trial balance. Not perfect — defensible. The books were current enough to operate against.
• Reconciliation backlog clearance. Worked through the outstanding reconciliations across the affected periods — bank, AR, AP, accruals, intercompany, balance sheet schedules. The prior month was brought to closed status with full review and sign-off. The current month was brought current. Two periods cleaned in one push.
• Process documentation — rebuilt from scratch. Every step that lived in the departed controller's head got rebuilt and written down: close calendar, journal entry template library, reconciliation checklist by account, accrual and intercompany methodology, and review and sign-off workflow.
• ClickUp close task management — installed and operational. Every step of the close modeled as a recurring task with the right owner, dependency, due date, and embedded checklist. The close now runs on a board the controller opens at the start of the month, not on a memory they have to hold.

The engagement ran twelve weeks: triage in week 1, backlog clearance across weeks 2–4, the documentation library and ClickUp build across weeks 5–8, and controller handover with a shadow period across weeks 9–12.