What an engagement looks like, what it costs, and what you are actually buying

Usually they stay and their job gets better. In most engagements the person already doing the day-to-day keeps doing it, and we add the review layer, the close discipline, and the reporting that was missing above them. That is cheaper for you than replacing institutional knowledge, and it is generally the right answer.

Where it does not work is when the existing arrangement is the cause of the problem rather than a victim of it. We will tell you plainly which situation you are in.

If the books are in reasonable shape, we are running your close within one full cycle, so between four and six weeks. If there is cleanup to do first, add the cleanup: usually one to three months depending on how far back the problems go and how many entities are involved.

We do not take over mid-close. We finish the current period the way it is being done now, then start clean.

Engagements are led and reviewed by senior practitioners. Transaction-level processing is handled by our own team, which includes staff based outside the United States, working under our supervision and our review standards rather than as a subcontracted arrangement.

We are direct about this because it is part of how the economics work, and because you should know who touches your ledger before you sign, not afterwards.

Not usually. We work in the ledger you already have in the large majority of engagements. Where we do recommend a change it is because the current system genuinely cannot do something you need, such as multi-entity consolidation or inventory at the level your business requires, and we say so with the reason rather than as a default.

If a migration is the right answer, we run it as a defined project rather than as a surprise.

Yes. Tax planning and compliance sit alongside the accounting and CFO work rather than as a separate relationship, which is the point: the people who close your books are the people who know your tax position, so the planning happens during the year rather than being discovered at filing.

If you have a tax preparer you are happy with, we work with them and hand over a clean year-end file.

No, and we cannot be. If you need an audit or a review, that has to come from an independent firm, and we support that process rather than perform it. In practice we prepare the schedules, answer the questions, and manage the audit so that your team is not doing it around their day job.

Most of our clients are between roughly five and two hundred million in revenue. Below that, a good bookkeeper and a good tax preparer is often genuinely the right answer and we will tell you so. Above it, you are usually better served by a full in-house department with us in a narrower advisory role.

Revenue is a weak signal though. Complexity matters more: a twelve million dollar business with four entities, inventory, and a bank covenant needs more finance function than a forty million dollar consultancy.

You do, without qualification. The ledger is in your name, the subscriptions are in your name where they can be, and the documentation of how your close runs is yours to keep. If you leave, you leave with a working finance function rather than with a dependency.

Engagements run month to month after an initial period, with thirty days notice. We do not use long lock-ins to hold onto work we are not doing well, and we would rather know early.

On exit we hand over reconciled books, the close calendar, the working papers, and a written handover to whoever takes it on.

A monthly review of the numbers as standard, and more when something is happening. Ad hoc questions are not billed and do not need to be saved up for the meeting. If you are in a CFO-led engagement, expect weekly contact during a raise, a diligence process, or a cash-tight period.

Yes, and this is where most of the value shows up. Diligence rarely fails on performance; it fails on substantiation, and every week of delay while you assemble schedules costs the seller leverage. Being ready in advance is worth considerably more than being fast under pressure.

If a transaction is on the horizon, say so early. Twelve months of clean, consistent, well-documented books is a materially different asset from three years of books cleaned up in a hurry.

A senior practitioner looks at your ledger, your close process, and your reconciliations, and tells you what is working, what is broken, and what is missing. You get that assessment whether or not you engage us, because it is also how we work out whether we can help and what to quote.

The catch, such as it is, is that we sometimes conclude you do not need us. That happens, and we say it.