In the world of finance and accounting, the concept of the so-called “virtual close” has been around for almost 20 years. In fact, I did some research and published a white paper on this topic back in 2002. At the time, there were several companies such as Cisco Systems and Motorola that had adopted the technique. At that time, the definition of the virtual close was the ability for a company to close its books at any time, within a few hours’ notice, and for management to have real-time insight into the state of the business.
Re-posted with permission from Source
