Dive Brief:
- OpenAI is aiming to make its month-end financial close cycle less of a recurring scramble and more of a continuous process, CFO Sarah Friar said in a Monday blog post.
- Friar, who joined OpenAI two years ago, said achieving this vision of a “zero-day close” is one of two “bold ambitions” she has set for the company's finance function, alongside automated, continuously updated forecasting.
- “We are still building toward both ambitions,” Friar said. “The work has already changed how our team operates. It has pushed us beyond the limitations of static spreadsheets, manual searches for supporting records and presentations toward live tools built on the full context and data of the business.”
Dive Insight:
A zero-day close, also known as a continuous or touchless close, refers to completing and recording transactions as they occur so that little or no additional work is needed when the accounting period ends, according to a July 2025 article from finance technology company Yooz.
“Rapid advancements in technology and automation have made the idea of a zero-day close a reality,” Yooz said. The company said the approach allows businesses to report their financial performance more quickly and frees employees from time-consuming, mundane processes.
For OpenAI, the push toward a zero-day close is part of Friar’s larger effort to build an “AI-native finance function,” according to her blog post. This comes as she is also building out her finance team to support a business growing at a rapid pace.
In March, OpenAI closed a funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a valuation of $852 billion. The ChatGPT maker has also begun preparing for a potential public offering, announcing in June that it confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Friar said that when she joined OpenAI two years ago, closing the books and updating forecasts still involved manual, recurring work, including finding information, explaining what changed and assembling inputs for decisions.
“We had access to the most advanced AI tools in the world, and we were still learning how to redesign finance around them,” she said.
The idea behind a zero-day close is to give leaders “a real-time, reconciled and traceable view of the company’s financial position,” according to Friar.
She said OpenAI is working to connect approved spending plans, general-ledger actuals, purchase orders, accruals and transaction details “in a continuously reconciled view.”
The broader ambition, Friar said, is a finance team that “understands what is happening as it happens, shows leaders what could happen next and helps the company make better decisions sooner.”
“Getting there requires more than adopting new technology,” she said. “It requires redesigning work around the decisions that matter, giving people room to experiment, building clear accountability into every workflow and measuring the dependable work AI completes to provide a clear ROI.”
