Nine systems, one template
Each company maps its own chart to the portfolio template by hand, monthly, differently. The mapping lives in an associate’s workbook and nowhere else.
Partners
Portfolio reporting fails for a structural reason: eleven companies on nine systems, each closing on its own timetable, consolidated by an associate in Excel. Standardising the systems is a multi-year programme. Standardising the reporting layer over them is a quarter.
Tell us your portfolio shape and what reporting you cannot get. We will scope it.
Partners
None of these are solved by mandating a single ERP across the portfolio, which is why that mandate so rarely survives contact with the first platform company.
Each company maps its own chart to the portfolio template by hand, monthly, differently. The mapping lives in an associate’s workbook and nowhere else.
A company closing in six days and one closing in eighteen cannot be consolidated on the same cadence, so the portfolio view moves at the pace of the slowest.
Adjusted EBITDA means something slightly different at each company because each CFO interpreted the template. The differences are legitimate and nobody has written them down.
At exit, three years of history has to be reassembled and reconciled, usually under time pressure, usually by the people least able to spare it.
Every bolt-on acquisition adds a system, a chart, and a close calendar. The consolidation problem grows superlinearly rather than by one.
The portfolio model is maintained by one associate. When they move on, several quarters of institutional knowledge leaves with them.
The instinct is to mandate one ERP across the portfolio. It is coherent on a slide and it runs into three things: each platform company has its own operational requirements, each has a CFO who did not choose you as their systems consultant, and each migration is a six to twelve month project competing with the actual value creation plan.
By the time two companies have migrated, two more have been acquired on different systems. The programme never converges, and the reporting problem it was meant to solve persists throughout.
Each company keeps its ledger. We read from it — QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Intacct, Dynamics, Acumatica, or a mix — and normalise into a portfolio-level graph with a shared chart, shared dimensions, and definitions recorded rather than remembered.
The consolidation becomes continuous rather than monthly, and the portfolio view is current in week two rather than three weeks after period end. Adding a bolt-on means adding a connector, not running a migration.
Where a platform company genuinely does need a new system, that decision is then made on its own merits and at its own pace, against a dataset that has already been proven to reconcile.
The most valuable output is not the monthly pack. It is that at exit, three years of reconciled, dimensioned, drill-through-capable history already exists rather than being reassembled under time pressure.
Every figure in a data room traces to the transactions behind it. Quality of earnings work gets faster because the adjustments are computed and documented rather than reconstructed, and the definitional differences between companies are recorded rather than argued about with a buyer’s advisers.
We have seen enough diligence processes stall on a portfolio company’s inability to produce dimensioned history to think this is where the return actually sits.
Portfolio engagements are scoped at the fund level rather than company by company, which usually makes them cheaper per company and considerably faster to start. Referral terms are the same 10% as everywhere else, with the same disclosure condition.
Where an operating partner is compensated for the introduction, the platform company must be told. We will confirm it and will tell them directly if asked.
We would rather prove this on a single platform company than sell a portfolio programme. Pick the one with the worst reporting, connect it read-only, and see whether the consolidated view arrives in two to three weeks as we claim. If it does not, you have spent a fixed fee finding out. If it does, the second company is a considerably easier conversation.
Questions
Pick the platform company with the worst reporting. A fixed fee and three weeks tells you whether the approach holds.