Step 1: Plan the year-end close from the matched ledger, early October
With a Finance Controller Digital FTE running, the year-end close does not start from a reconstruction; it starts from a ledger matched daily with a short exception list. Plan the close around the judgement items instead: accruals, revenue recognition, deferred revenue, fixed assets, the audit adjustments, each with an owner and a date. Confirm the FTE's exception list is being cleared weekly through the quarter so it is short on day one. Confirm the auditor's requested exports from the trail are scheduled. The days-to-close metric for the year-end will be compared with last year's, which was a reconstruction.
The audit preparation playbook covers the exports; this step is about the close itself.
Step 2: Name every approver's deputy before the holidays, November
Digital FTEs keep proposing through the holidays; nothing happens until a person decides, which is the safe failure mode, but a proposal that waits two weeks is a function that stopped. For every role, every approver names a deputy in the routing, and the deputies are shown the role's remit and the send-back reasons so their decisions match. The workforce view's waiting count is the daily check: a growing count over the holidays is an approver gap, visible before it becomes a backlog. For escalations on the always-escalate list, the seasonal receivers and out-of-hours rota are confirmed as in the peak-season playbook.
The story of a day in the workforce view shows the waiting count doing this job.
- Every approver: a named deputy, briefed on the remit
- Escalate list: seasonal receivers and out-of-hours rota
- Daily check: the waiting count in the workforce view
Step 3: Freeze promotions and remit changes, December
From the start of the holiday period to the first full week of the new year, no class is promoted, no remit is changed beyond receivers and deputies, and no plan change is made beyond what step five's budget requires. A step-back during a period when the manager is away is the most expensive kind, and a remit change nobody is watching is an incident waiting. The freeze is recorded in each role's review note with its dates. Detections still run and still surface in the brief; the deputies read them and escalate rather than act.
The Promotion Standard's refusals include peaks and closes for this reason.
Step 4: Run the quarterly governance audit in the quiet week
The week between the holidays and the year-end close, or the first quiet week of January, is the quarterly governance audit: for each role, the connection review with scopes confirmed at the tools, the remit's three lists re-read against the send-back reasons, the always-escalate list checked for growth after any incident, the Brand Brain confirmed with stale facts corrected, the autonomy ladder read per class with any step-back's reason, and the incident log reviewed. Record each with a name and a date. The governance audit playbook in the library gives the full checklist.
Doing it in the quiet week means the year starts with every role's controls confirmed.
Step 5: Decide next year's roles from the record, late Q4
Next year's roles are decided under the Second-Role Test, per role, from the record: is each existing role settled, does its manager have spare approval time, which candidate functions have clear evidence and a baseline that can be recorded in January, and does the budget-season block fund them. The candidates come from the First-Function Matrix applied to the functions people still do by hand, which the baseline sheets and the send-back reasons reveal. Write the plan as a sequence, one role per cycle, with the cycle each starts, and put the estimated usage into the budget line.
The budget-season playbook describes the block; this step decides what it funds.
Step 6: Read every role's year in its own record, January
Before the new year's first monthly reviews, read each role's year in its Performance tab: outcomes against targets by cycle, cost per outcome by cycle against the baseline, the approval rate per class and the send-back reasons' trend, the promotions and step-backs, the incidents with their fixes, and the manager's hours by cycle. Write a one-page year note per role. It is the honest annual review of a direct report, and it is the document the next budget review, the next audit, and the next Second-Role Test will read.
The monthly review note template's fields, read across twelve cycles, are the year note.
What does done look like?
A year-end close planned around judgement items from a matched ledger, with the trail exports scheduled; every approver with a named, briefed deputy and the waiting count watched daily through the holidays; a recorded freeze on promotions and remit changes with its dates; a quarterly governance audit completed in the quiet week with names and dates; next year's roles sequenced under the Second-Role Test with usage in the budget; and a one-page year note per role. The first monthly reviews of the new year start from those notes.
The hybrid team management piece describes the routing practices the quarter depends on.