Why, after 30-40 years of modern computing in accounting does it still take a month to close the …

This is a naive view of what reporting entails and the difficulty of coalescing a report that meets the requirements of the audience the report is for. It isn't a numbers dump from a database, it requires substantial interpretation of things that the database does not and cannot contain. It isn't fiddling with the numbers, it is that the numbers can't contain things relevant to their representation for external parties as a legal matter. When I have been in positions where reporting was a necessary part of my job, reporting related activity probably consumed 1/3 of my time. Even in highly optimized contexts, it consumes a stupid amount of time and the impact on the consumers of those reports is often quite low. It is almost a total waste of time. There should be some reporting but the current cadence and requirements is way too high for many large companies. Reporting doesn't have infini…

My fiancee is the accounting manager at a university. Why? Because people don't submit expenses on time, invoices are delayed or some still done manually, and all manner of things. Even for them it can take a couple of weeks. While there may be some "hijinks" (in their case, institutional advancement likes to steadily rearrange endowments or donations to take advantage of offers to match donations, etc., but that's not really a delay, as accounting basically says things like "No, that gift has already been spent"). Even with things like Concur or Expensify, expenses aren't classified on time, submitted for reimbursement, etc.