Finance's Ramadan begins now

Marketing's month ended with Eid, depending on the sighting. Finance's begins now.

The pile arrives all at once because everything in it was committed all at once. Production for a film cut nine ways, most of them never used. The broadcaster's reconciliation, showing what delivered against what was booked, with a credit somebody now has to argue for. Creator fees agreed in a hurry in February. Overtime, under its polite name, out of scope. Courier lines from a fortnight when everything moved after dark. A good share of it carries no purchase order, because the order was going to be raised after the month.

All of it lands in the same fortnight the quarter closes on the thirty-first, in front of a finance team that is booking accruals and, for anyone whose year ends with the British one, closing a year as well.

So the first version of this month that a chief financial officer reads is not a result. It is a cost, arriving late, from the team that spent it fastest.

I have sat on the marketing side of that and thought the order was unfair. It is not unfair, it is arithmetic. An invoice has a due date and a system that chases it. A result has neither. The honest measurement takes three weeks, because the reconciliation does, and the returns do, and the second purchase, the one the whole month was supposedly for, has not happened yet.

By the time it arrives, the month has already been read, filed and used. Which is why the April conversation so often opens from a number nobody in marketing chose.

The teams that come out of this well put a rough result beside the invoice in the same week, uncertainty and all, rather than a good one a fortnight later.

Whoever describes the month first describes it.