Three engagements, described in full
What the books looked like when we arrived, what we found, what we changed, and where it landed. Client names are withheld under our engagement terms; everything else is as it happened.
We do not publish client names. Finance is the one function where companies do not want their weak points on someone else's website, and we would rather keep the work than win the logo. Everything below is described closely enough that you can recognise your own situation in it.
The close moved from day 24 to day 8, and one sales channel turned out to be losing money on every order
A founder-led CPG business had tripled revenue in three years and kept the same accounting setup it had at $12M: one bookkeeper, an outside CPA at year end, and a chart of accounts that had never been redesigned. The monthly close landed around day 24. By the time the numbers arrived, the month they described was already over and the next one was nearly half gone. Every pricing and inventory decision was being made on gut feel and last year's assumptions.
Once margin was visible by channel, one large retail programme turned out to be running at negative contribution once freight, slotting, and deductions were counted against it. The company renegotiated terms on part of it, exited the rest, and moved the volume to channels that carried their own cost. That decision had been available for two years. Nobody could see it because the reporting averaged it away.
A founder stopped being the CFO, and the company could see thirteen weeks out instead of two
A software company had raised a Series A, grown to $19M in recurring revenue, and never hired a finance leader. The founder built the model, ran the board pack, and answered the investors' questions personally. It worked until two things landed in the same quarter: a bank wanted a facility documented properly, and the board wanted a defensible plan to profitability. Neither could be produced from a spreadsheet the founder maintained between customer calls.
The facility closed. More usefully, the forecast surfaced a cash trough eleven weeks out that nobody had seen, caused by an annual infrastructure prepayment landing in the same month as a payroll cycle with three pay dates. Knowing about it in advance turned a potential scramble into a phone call and a renegotiated payment date. The founder now spends board meetings arguing about strategy rather than defending arithmetic.
Fourteen hundred invoices a month stopped being typed in by hand, and the close came in eleven days earlier
A services group had grown by acquisition into four legal entities, each with its own ledger, its own approval habits, and its own idea of what a vendor record should look like. Accounts payable ran on email and a shared inbox. Two people spent most of their week keying invoices, chasing approvals, and reconciling intercompany balances that never quite agreed. The consolidated close took nineteen business days, and the group had started to consider a fifth hire just to keep pace.
The fifth hire was not made. The two people who had been keying invoices now own vendor relationships, cash application, and the balance sheet reconciliations, which is work that actually needed doing and nobody had time for. Consolidated vendor spend became visible for the first time, and the group renegotiated its three largest supplier contracts on volume it had always had but could never demonstrate.
If any of that sounded like your month end, start with the assessment
Eight questions on how your books actually run. You get a score and the order we would fix things in, with no call required. Or work out what building the same coverage in-house would cost you.