The month-end benchmark
The median business takes 6.4 days to close its books.
Restaurant groups have every structural reason to be slower. Nobody has measured by how much — so this report says what is known, names what is not, and shows the source for both.
No published dataset measures how long a restaurant group takes to close. Every close-day figure on this page is a cross-industry benchmark applied to hospitality by analogy, and is labelled as one every time it appears.
We could have written a number and hoped nobody checked. Instead we are running the survey that would produce a real one — details at the bottom.
The anchor · cross-industry
Six and a half days, and stuck there.
Top quartile
≤ 4.8 days
Calendar days, trial balance to consolidated statements
Median
6.4 days
The middle of ~2,300 organisations
Bottom quartile
≥ 10 days
A close that eats a fortnight of the month
Those are APQC’s figures from its Open Standards Benchmarking across roughly 2,300 organisations, measuring calendar days from running the trial balance to completing the consolidated statements. They are cross-industry — not hospitality.
The more useful finding is that the number has barely moved. APQC’s reporting puts it at about 6.4 days in 2015 and about 6.0 in 2024. A decade of automation being available has bought the median business roughly half a day.
Why hospitality sits at the slow end
Five reasons, none of them the invoices.
These are sector-specific and verifiable, and no cross-industry benchmark captures any of them.
01
Thirteen closes, not twelve
Restaurants and hospitality widely run a 4-4-5 or 13-period calendar so every period holds the same number of weekends. It makes sales comparable — and it means a period-end close thirteen times a year instead of twelve, with payroll and labour landing inside the period rather than being accrued at the end of it. No cross-industry benchmark accounts for this.
QuickBooks, CFO Edge, FIXE — widely documented sector practice
02
The stock count cannot be skipped
Period-end physical stock feeds cost of sales. It is a genuinely sector-specific close driver: a manufacturer counts too, but a restaurant counts perishable stock across every site, at the same time, in the days the close is already competing for.
Restaurant365 year-end checklist
03
The invoices arrive as paper and PDF
Only 29% of UK SMEs use e-invoicing at all, and just 10% both send and receive it. The most common method is still a PDF by email, followed by paper. No hospitality-specific split has been published, so this all-SME figure is the closest defensible proxy.
HMRC e-invoicing research, fieldwork February–March 2025
04
Every site is its own entity
A group closes each legal entity, then consolidates, and the intercompany recharges between sites have to agree before it can. Consolidation adds time on top of the entity closes it depends on.
APQC Open Standards Benchmarking
05
The people doing it keep leaving
Hospitality has the highest staff turnover of any UK sector at roughly 52% a year, against a UK average near 34%. Site-level data capture depends on people who, statistically, will not be there next year — and the finance function hiring to keep up is doing so into a documented accountant shortage.
CIPD analysis of ONS Annual Population Survey; FRC 2025; Robert Half 2026
What the manual version costs
Per invoice, and per year.
Cost per invoice
$10.18
Against $2.36 best-in-class — Ardent Partners, 2024
Days to process one
10.9
Against 3.1 best-in-class — Ardent Partners, 2025
Lost to duplicates
0.8–2%
Of total disbursements — APQC
Ardent Partners’ cost-per-invoice figures are in US dollars and drawn predominantly from US respondents; UK vendors quote £8–£16 manual against £2–£4 automated, which is marketing rather than research. The shape of the gap is consistent across all of them.
One in four manually keyed invoices raises an exception that takes twenty to thirty minutes to resolve, and roughly two-thirds of organisations still key invoices into their ledger by hand.
What nobody has measured
Four things this report cannot tell you.
- 01How long a UK restaurant group's close actually takes. No dataset measures it. Every close-day figure in this report is cross-industry, applied by analogy.
- 02How large a finance function is at each group size band. Nothing published.
- 03What proportion of hospitality invoices arrive on paper rather than electronically. Only all-SME data exists.
- 04What share of UK hospitality has adopted AP automation. No published rate.
The survey
Help us produce the real number.
We are running a survey of UK multi-site restaurant and hospitality groups to measure what nobody has: working days from period-end to management accounts, by group size, accounting calendar and whether AP is automated.
Twelve questions, finance leads only, and every respondent gets the results before they are published. When it clears fifty qualified responses the analogy on this page gets replaced with a measured figure — and the report will say who funded it, because we did.
To take part, write to info@getfinio.co.uk.
Sources
Every figure, and where it came from.
| Figure | Source | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Median close 6.4 days; top ≤4.8; bottom ≥10 | APQC Open Standards Benchmarking | ~2,300 organisations, global, cross-industry |
| Close times barely moved, ~6.4 → ~6.0 days | APQC | 2015–2024, cross-industry |
| Cost of finance 0.7%–1.8% of revenue | APQC | 1,515 organisations |
| Cost of finance, top quartile 0.55% | PwC Finance Effectiveness Benchmarking | Fieldwork December 2023 |
| Cost per invoice $10.18 vs $2.36 best-in-class | Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2024 | Predominantly US |
| Invoice cycle 10.9 days vs 3.1 best-in-class | Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2025 | n=310, predominantly US |
| Duplicate payments 0.8%–2% of disbursements | APQC | Cross-industry |
| 29% of UK SMEs use e-invoicing | HMRC e-invoicing research | Fieldwork February–March 2025, UK, all sectors |
| Hospitality turnover ~52%, highest UK sector | CIPD, analysing ONS Annual Population Survey | January 2022 – December 2023, UK |
| 99,120 licensed hospitality outlets | CGA by NIQ / AlixPartners Hospitality Market Monitor | December 2024, GB |
| Accountancy students 166k → 155k, 2014–24 | FRC | Seven professional bodies, UK |
| 214 invoices per restaurant location per month | Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ) | Vendor internal data, US — directional only |
Two things worth flagging on the anchor itself. APQC’s headline derives from 2017–18 fieldwork and is ageing, and some secondary sources cite 8.0 days rather than 6.4 from the same survey — we have used 6.4 and are telling you the conflict exists rather than choosing quietly. Vendor figures are named as vendor figures throughout.
Or find out what your own close costs.
Published by Finio, which sells software that makes the close faster. We have said so here rather than at the bottom in small type.