IT can help by making it clear to the folks in finance where there are bottlenecks in the flow of information necessary to complete the close and to perform the audit. Also, far too many companies are still stuck on spreadsheets, which usually contain far too many errors. Too often, the need to correct those errors ends up driving your close schedule.

If it is not already in place, the No. 1 piece of new software that companies should invest in is financial consolidation software, dumping their spreadsheets in the process, Kugel says.

High-performance hardware helps. For example, Cartesis Finance now runs on HP Integrity servers.

Walker is also a big fan of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, telling me that its automated real-time OLAP mechanism prevents it from having to rely on batch processing.

Getting IT and the finance department working together can help drive the success of your business in subtle ways. If your company hasn't realized that yet, it is about time it woke up.