Financial reporting · The close calendar · Element

The bottleneck

The step that actually determines when the close finishes.

The part

What it is

Usually one input from outside finance — a supplier statement, a stock count, an operational number — and usually the same one every period.

Naming it converts a general complaint about the close being slow into a specific and solvable problem.

The smallest level

The attributes it carries

Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.