As long as they’re meeting their regulatory reporting deadlines, most enterprises don’t think a lot about closing their books more quickly.

Maybe they should start.

Increasingly, the speed with which an organization closes its books and reports its financial results is being looked at by practitioners, analysts and investors as a defining metric for evaluating whether the organization possesses the best possible processes and enabling technologies. And it turns out that many companies don’t, even those making huge IT investments and supporting equally large IT departments.

World-class companies can close their books internally in five days, while top performers can do it in three, says Scott Holland, IT practice leader at the Hackett Group, a strategic advisory firm. But only about 10 percent of U.S. enterprises are in that class, Holland says.

Ask a typical CIO how his company could improve its financial reporting and his recommendations most likely will focus on mechanics: normalizing data, collecting it and passing it on to some central repository. Some CIOs will go a little further to suggest that the data generation and gathering systems be reviewed for compliance requirements. And that’s fine as far as it goes—except it doesn’t go very far. It doesn’t address what most CFOs need; it doesn’t help the business run more intelligently; it doesn’t cement IT-business alignment. No matter how integrated a company’s financial streams are, CFOs will still struggle to close the books and issue the appropriate reports. Their staffs will still spend countless hours reconciling data gathered from multiple departments and systems—all under deadlines that are shrinking even as regulators ask for more information.

At the very least, what the business needs from IT is a way to make the financial close and reporting process more efficient and accurate in order to lower costs and minimize the risk of providing incorrect information to stockholders and regulators.

But that’s merely a tactical improvement. The real opportunities lie elsewhere. By redesigning the organization’s financial processes and then implementing the technology infrastructure to execute them, business managers and executives can gain a near–real-time view of financial performance, enabling them to identify problems and opportunities much earlier. A second opportunity is to understand the relationships of all financial information so managers and executives can do analysis outside the box. Lastly, by providing accurate filings more quickly than your competitors, your company will increase investor confidence, and that will put a smile on the face of every business executive and make the CIO king for (at least) a day. (For how a faster close can lead to better business-IT alignment, see “Speeding Alignment” in Related Stories)