Find out what is actually wrong, before you pay anyone
A proper look at your reporting, cash, margins, controls, compliance and systems, delivered as a written diagnosis with a ranked list of what to fix and what it is worth. It takes two to three weeks, it costs nothing, and the report is yours whether or not you ever work with us.
- Cost
- Nothing
- Duration
- 2 to 3 weeks
- You provide
- 2 years of accounts,
a bank position, an hour - You receive
- A written, ranked diagnosis
- Obligation
- None
- Confidentiality
- NDA before we see anything
- The report is
- Yours to keep
Seven things we look at
Reporting
How long the close takes, what the management pack contains, whether it answers the questions you actually ask, and how far it is from something a board or a lender would accept.
Cash and working capital
Whether you can see cash forward, where it is tied up in receivables, inventory or work in progress, and what your real collection cycle is rather than your stated payment terms.
Margin visibility
Whether you can tell which products, customers, contracts or branches make money, and what would be needed to find out if you cannot.
Controls
Approval limits, bank mandates, segregation of duties and the payment run. Sized for a small team, not copied from a large company manual.
Statutory compliance
Filing calendar, audit relationship, and the obligations specific to your jurisdiction. The country pages on this site give you a preview of what we check.
Systems and process
What your accounting system is doing, what people are doing by hand around it, and which of those tasks are worth automating.
The team
Whether the finance function is structured and staffed for the business you have now, and what the next hire should be if there is one.
Four steps, no proposal document
A 30 minute call
You describe the business and what is bothering you. If it is clear you do not need this, we say so on the call and nobody wastes an afternoon.
You send four things
The last two years of financial statements, the most recent management accounts, a current bank position, and access to whoever knows how the business really runs. That is the whole list.
We look properly
Two to three weeks, including a conversation with your accountant or finance manager. Not a questionnaire and not a template.
You get a written report
What is working, what is broken, what it is costing you, and a ranked list of what to fix first. Yours to keep and to act on however you like.
Setting expectations honestly
It is not an audit
We are not giving an opinion on your financial statements and we are not testing balances. That is your auditor’s job and a different exercise entirely.
It is not a sales meeting with a document attached
The report says what we found, including the parts that are fine. If your finance function is in reasonable shape we will tell you that, which is not a useful thing to say if the goal were to sell you an engagement.
It is not a template
A questionnaire with a scored output is a lead magnet, not a diagnosis. This involves reading your actual numbers and talking to the people who produce them.
It will not fix anything by itself
It tells you what to do. Doing it is either your team, us, or someone else. A report that sits in a drawer has cost you nothing and gained you nothing.
The obvious suspicions
Why is it free?
Because it is the honest way to sell this. You cannot evaluate a CFO from a proposal, and we cannot scope an engagement properly without looking at the actual numbers. Doing the diagnosis first means we both make the decision with the same information. It also means we sometimes tell people they do not need us, which costs us an engagement and saves you a great deal more.
What is the catch?
There is not one, but here is the honest economics so you can judge for yourself. It costs us two to three weeks of senior time. A reasonable proportion of the companies we do this for go on to engage us, and that pays for the ones who do not. If you take the report and implement it yourself, that is a fine outcome and it happens regularly.
Do we have to engage you afterwards?
No. There is no obligation, no follow-on clause, and the report is yours whatever you decide. If you want to hand it to your own accountant or to another adviser, that is entirely your business.
Will you sign an NDA first?
Yes, and we would expect to. Nothing is shared with anyone and your name does not appear anywhere unless you put it in writing that it may.
Is it really free for a company of any size?
For the small and mid-sized companies this practice serves, yes. For a large group with many entities the diagnostic work is genuinely bigger, and in that case we would tell you upfront what it needs and what it costs rather than quietly scaling back what we look at.
What if our books are a mess?
That is the normal starting point and it is not a reason to delay. We are not there to judge the bookkeeping. We are there to tell you what has to happen and in what order, and a messy set of books usually makes the ranked list more useful rather than less.