A defensible back-of-envelope for your audit committee.

How the model works

The calculator uses these assumptions, drawn from published vendor benchmarks and a conservative interpretation. Edit the inputs above to see how sensitive the output is to each.

Assumption	Value	Source
Close hours per close-day per FTE	8	Industry norm (1 close-day = 1 FTE-day of close work)
Team diminishing returns cap	min(FTEs, 4)	Beyond 4 FTEs concurrent close work shows little marginal benefit
Automation reduction band	30%	Vendor-published benchmarks (Numeric ~35%, FloQast ~28%, Vic.ai ~32%)
Time per repetitive exception	12 minutes	Average across 4 published case studies
Audit-prep reduction	25%	Conservative; published vendor claims range 30-50%
Implementation cost	$16,000	80 engineering hours @ $200/hr
Annual API cost	$12,000	Anthropic API midpoint; varies with volume

What the model excludes

• Opportunity cost of analyst time. Time saved on close gets reallocated to FP&A / strategic work, not just removed from the team budget. The model under-counts here.
• Fraud-prevention upside. Materiality routing + sensitive-account flagging catches incidents that would otherwise burn 2-4 controller-weeks each. Not modeled because the frequency is non-deterministic.
• Audit-finding cost. A material audit finding can cost $50K – $500K in remediation + reputation. Server-side controls reduce probability; the model doesn't price this.
• Vendor lock-in cost. The cost of not being able to leave a commercial vendor without re-implementing the controls layer. Material in year 3+; not modeled.

Reproducible from the CLI

Running closegate locally? Reproduce any figure from the live workspace widget on the command line:

closegate-engine impact-calc \
  --seed-pack saas \
  --fte-count 5 \
  --hourly-rate-usd 125 \
  --close-days 6

Returns deterministic JSON. Pin in your CI; cite in your board pre-read.

Want a sensitivity analysis?

Tweak the inputs above to see how each lever moves the year-one ROI. Default sensitivity ordering (most to least impactful):

1. FTE count (linear; doubles savings up to the 4-FTE cap)
2. Hourly cost (linear)
3. Close-days per month (linear)
4. Audit cost (25% savings on this line)
5. Repetitive-exception percentage (12 min × exceptions × pct)