Where the days go missing for multi-plant food or beverage business finance teams

Where the days go missing for multi-plant food or beverage business finance teams

Ask a controller at a multi-plant food or beverage business how long the close takes, and you’ll usually get a sigh before you get a number! That instinct is backed by the data. ISG/Ventana Research found the monthly close has stalled at roughly six business days for the average organisation since 2019 and the quarterly close has actually gotten slower over the same period. Gartner’s counterpoint is that cloud ERP with embedded AI could deliver a 30% faster close by 2028. The gap between where most manufacturers are today and where the market says they could be is exactly where the pain lives. 

Food and beverage manufacturing makes that gap wider than most. Galorath/NewtonX’s 2025 Manufacturing Industry Report found that 96% of manufacturers still rely on Excel for cost estimation, and only 4% have automated more than three-quarters of it. IoT Analytics puts it even more starkly at plant level: 54% of plants globally were still run on pen, paper or spreadsheets in 2024, 2 years on this is still the case. That matters enormously in this sector because the close doesn’t start with the general ledger, it starts with inventory valuation, standard-cost variance and batch or recipe costing, all of which begin life on the shop floor before they ever reach finance. Get that wrong, or get it late, and margin simply isn’t knowable until weeks after the period has closed. 

It’s also where the auditors are watching hardest. KPMG’s 2025 study of material weaknesses found that close and reporting is now the single most common control failure, cited in 84% of cases in 2025, up from 71% the year before and “lack of accounting personnel or expertise” as a stated cause jumped from 59% to 73% over the same period. Add a compliance calendar that keeps growing (Pillar Two’s 15% minimum tax, CSRD reporting, and for U.S. food manufacturers the FDA’s Food Traceability Rule, whose enforcement deadline was pushed to July 2028) and you have a controllership team defending more ground with fewer hands. 

This is the exact problem Pacera’s Aico and AARO were built around. Aico automates the transactional close that food and beverage manufacturers actually run – reconciling inventory, GRNI and bank accounts, monitoring cost variances during the period rather than after it, and posting both sides of an intercompany transaction simultaneously so the mismatch never reaches consolidation. AARO then consolidates in real time across every plant entity, handling the unrealised-profit-in-inventory elimination that makes manufacturing consolidations so laborious, and reconciling local statutory books to group IFRS from one model instead of two parallel ones. 

The published outcomes are worth quoting with the right caveat attached – they’re Pacera’s figures, not third-party audits, but they’re concrete: 50–90% faster reconciliations, close cycles cut from roughly ten days to five or fewer, and up to 50% faster group consolidation. Tecan, running 40+ entities across 40 SAP company codes, now automates 66% of its closing controls and tracks over 3,800 tasks across nine entities in a single month. AkzoNobel runs Aico across 499 entities in 150 countries on seven separate SAP instances – proof the model holds at genuinely large, multi-plant scale. 

Coming up in Part 3: how connecting the close, the consolidation and the plan into one platform changes the conversation from “what happened” to “what’s next” – and why that’s the real prize for food and beverage finance teams. 

Curious how many of those closing days you could get back? Book a walkthrough of Aico and AARO →