Closing the books on manual EOFY madness

By Wayne Goodall, Vice President, Cloud Applications Development, Oracle JAPAC

For decades, the end of financial year (EOFY) has marked a high-pressure sprint for Australian finance teams. Reconciliations, compliance reporting, and last-minute adjustments dominate the calendar, often resulting in a stressful and resource-heavy close.

But that model is starting to shift. Finance leaders face growing pressure to navigate uncertainty, adapt to regulatory change, and do more with leaner teams. These challenges expose the limitations of traditional EOFY cycles, which depend on manual effort, disconnected systems, and fixed reporting timelines. In response, many organisations are adopting a continuous finance model — a more agile, intelligence-driven approach enabled by automation and agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At the heart of this shift is a move toward touchless operations, where core finance processes run autonomously, in real time, with minimal human intervention. Touchless operations can apply to every end-to-end finance process, with the underlying AI-powered automation helping to reduce complexity and increase accuracy and completeness. EOFY isn’t going away, but it’s being transformed from a high-stakes scramble into a routine performance checkpoint.

From compliance sprints to continuous finance operations

Traditional finance models were built for control at set intervals: monthly closes, quarterly reports, annual audits. But business now moves faster than those cycles can support. Boards and regulators expect real-time insights. Waiting until year-end to assess performance is no longer tenable.

For many organisations, financial data still lives in spreadsheets, manual handoffs slow decisions, and reporting is backward-looking. Automation is no longer just about improving efficiency. It’s about enabling finance to keep pace with business.

While many organisations have started automating individual tasks, AI agents now offer the opportunity to go further, enabling touchless finance for end-to-end workflows. For example, Oracle has embedded agentic capabilities directly into Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as well as offering a platform for building and orchestration agents and agent teams.

What does this look like in a finance process like in accounts payable?

• With Oracle Cloud ERP, a document IO agent autonomously ingests data, self-corrects or identifies when it needs additional help, and creates necessary documentation.
• The payments agent then identifies discount opportunities and provides payment options for optimizing working capital, staging the action for human review and approval. Once this transaction is approved, the agent creates the necessary documentation and communicates and completes the transaction with the vendor and/or bank.
• An account reconciliation agent then performs real-time reconciliations and transaction matching.
• A ledger agent also performs continuous account balance reconciliations and analyses, while also providing any required draft journal entries for review and approval.

Challenging legacy processes and redesigning finance workflows

AI-driven finance presents an opportunity to eliminate redundancies and streamline workflows while adopting new, high-value capabilities as they’re introduced. As inputs change, touchless operations can adjust with little to no manual involvement. This means forecasts update dynamically, compliance becomes a built-in part of operations, not a last-minute checklist, and finance teams can redirect their focus to analysis and strategic priorities.

This level of transformation requires systems that do more than record data. They need to understand it, interpret it, and act on it.

Oracle’s transformation: From faster close to smarter finance

Oracle’s own global finance team is demonstrating what’s possible when automation and AI are embedded into enterprise workflows. By streamlining processes and using Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), the team has reduced its global time-to-close to under 10 workdays, which is the fastest in the S&P 500, and accelerated financial planning by 35 percent.

Today, 97 percent of Oracle’s banking transactions are automatically reconciled, and nearly a third of balance sheet reconciliations require no human touch. These changes have shifted the finance function from reactive reporting to continuous, insight-led decision-making.

Redefining EOFY for the modern CFO

In a modern, AI-driven finance environment, EOFY becomes less of a deadline and more of a checkpoint, a quick validation step in a system already running with speed, accuracy, and integrity.

When reconciliations are continuous, compliance is embedded, and reports are always current, EOFY no longer requires a last-minute sprint. It becomes just another day in a function that is always ready.

This shift gives CFOs and their teams the space to focus on strategic outcomes. Instead of spending weeks buried in spreadsheets, finance can lead performance planning, scenario analysis, and cross-functional collaboration. Rather than spending all their time discovering and explaining what happened, they can help shape what happens next.

The opportunity ahead

EOFY has long stood as a symbol of financial discipline. But in a world that demands constant performance visibility, it also reflects a system that may no longer fit. Today’s CFOs are being asked to rethink how finance works with AI at the foundation. AI-driven finance is the starting point for a new operating model built on continuous insight, agility, and orchestration.

For CFOs willing to lead that change, the benefits are clear: a more resilient finance function, a more agile business, and a team that delivers value every day, not just once a year.