Rethinking month-end close with Mimo Associate

The most forward-looking accounting firms share a recognisable quality. They've invested seriously in technology, built genuine digital capability and developed teams that think beyond compliance. They've done, in other words, everything the industry has asked of them.

And yet month-end still arrives the same way it always has: As a concentrated event that pulls the team's attention, triggers a familiar cycle of document chasing and manual review, and leaves limited room for the advisory work that actually differentiates a firm of their calibre.

This isn't a failure of ambition, but rather a structural gap. The space between having good tools and having a system that connects them. The industry has so far built solutions for individual tasks, but few have built for what actually happens in between.

That's the problem Mimo Associate was designed to solve. And PM+M, one of the North West's leading chartered accountancy and advisory firms, were among the first to put it to the test.

Meet PM+M

PM+M didn't need an introduction to innovation. With more than 150 specialists across Blackburn and Bury, they've built one of the region's most genuinely digital-first practices - one where services begin with digitisation, and where the question of what technology can do for clients is asked constantly, not occasionally.

"We spend a lot of time on innovation, making sure that we're looking at what's new in the market, how we can adapt and use these tools to provide a better service for our clients," said Jill, Partner at PM+M.

It's precisely because they had done so much right that their experience with month-end is worth paying attention to. A firm with a strong tech stack, a culture of adoption, and a team of genuine advisors, and still, the coordination burden of close was consuming hours that could have been spent differently.

"The back and forth with the client can take too much time," said Tyler, Advisor at PM+M. "Some clients it could take up to about two hours - back and forth in just time that isn't chargeable. It definitely slows down our efficiencies."

Rosie Cooper, Director of Cloud at PM+M, named the consequence: "We are missing opportunities for really valuable advisory work because we have a deadline we need to deliver by."

Things that changed with Associate

Mimo Associate is a complete system of work for month-end. It brings together document collection, coding and reconciliation, adjustments, and review-ready outputs into a single platform that works throughout the entire month so that by the time close arrives, the work is already largely done. Month-end stops being a single event and becomes a continuous process.

For PM+M, the difference showed up immediately in the places where time had quietly been disappearing.

Document collection

Document collection, previously scattered across email, WhatsApp, and phone calls, moved into a single client portal. "The fact that the client has one portal they can log onto, upload all their information and communicate with us through there - but it's still a personalised experience - has really solved a pain point," said Anya, Advisor at PM+M.

Adjustments

Prepayments and accruals, which previously was a manual line-by-line review, are now identified and proposed automatically based on incoming documents and ledger history. A process that took 30 to 45 minutes per journal entry now happens without prompting. 

"We used to have to do a lot of manual work clicking into each expense item," Anya recalled. "’Does this need accruing? Does this need prepaying?’ Mimo is making all those suggestions for us now. It saved us a lot of time and allows us to spend more time giving the clients really good context behind the figures."

One system of work

For Tyler, the impact of having everything in one platform went beyond individual time savings. "Having a place where we can see what stage things are at, if they're in for review, if they just need a few prepayments done and having that AI assistance behind it. I don't think people realise how much time is wasted jumping between different softwares. It could be 10 minutes per client, and if you're working on as many clients as we do a day, it definitely adds up."

The bigger picture

PM+M's interest in Associate was never narrowly about efficiency. It was about unlocking the firm’s longer-term ambitions and about what their team could become when the coordination burden was lifted. When the manual work is handled, the time that opens up belongs to the people best placed to use it.

When Rosie's wider team saw the full picture, her read of the room was clear: "On that call, everyone was really excited about it. As a leader in this team, it makes you feel like you're making the right decision."

That reaction reflects something important. The firms that will define the next decade of accounting are already asking what becomes possible when their best people aren't stretched across admin. PM+M are one of them, and in helping us build Associate around how great firms actually work, they've helped shape what that future looks like.

Mimo Associate is available now. If your firm is ready to ask what comes next, we'd like to show you what that looks like in practice.

Learn more about Mimo Associate.