How do I move beyond just closing the books every month?

You are trusted and genuinely essential, and yet the monthly close swallows you whole, and you are left wondering if your working life is just keeping the score forever. That restlessness is not ingratitude. It is a sign you have more to give than the grind currently lets you, and that is worth paying attention to instead of ignoring. The close will always be there, it is the reliable, necessary heartbeat of the work. But being buried in it is partly a trap of habit and process. When the routine consumes all your time, there is none left to step back and do the higher work: seeing what the numbers mean, advising, improving how things run. Some of freeing yourself is making the close more efficient so it stops eating every hour, through better systems, automation, or delegation. The other part is deciding, on purpose, to grow beyond the scorekeeper role, and telling the people who can open that door. Nobody hands it to you unasked. One step: pick one part of the close you could streamline to buy back some time, and use that time for one piece of higher-value work you can show your leaders. That is how a scorekeeper becomes an advisor, one reclaimed hour at a time.