The close, measured
Every step timed, dependencies mapped, and the critical path identified — which is usually one or two steps everything else waits on rather than general slowness.
Services
Before anybody sells you software, somebody should tell you what is actually wrong. Most finance teams know their close is slow and cannot say precisely where the days go, because measuring it properly takes a week nobody has.
Tell us your systems and close timeline. We will confirm scope and dates.
The situation
Five areas, each producing findings with evidence rather than impressions.
Every step timed, dependencies mapped, and the critical path identified — which is usually one or two steps everything else waits on rather than general slowness.
Duplicate customers and vendors, unmapped transactions, missing dimensions, and unbalanced periods, counted rather than characterised.
Who can post, who can approve, who can change vendor banking — evaluated against what actually happened last quarter rather than against the documented policy.
Every system, what it holds, where data is re-keyed between them, and which spreadsheets are load-bearing. The spreadsheet map usually surprises people.
What reconciles, how often, and what has quietly stopped. There is almost always at least one account nobody has tied out in a year.
Each finding costed and sequenced, including the ones you can fix yourself without buying anything from anyone.
A free assessment is a sales call with a document attached, and everybody involved knows it. The findings point at the thing the vendor sells, because that is what a free assessment is for.
Charging $4,500 changes the incentive. We are being paid to tell you what is wrong, including when what is wrong is a process rather than a system, and including when the correct advice is to keep what you have and fix three specific things.
Day one is read-only access and interviews — controller, AP, AR, and whoever actually closes the books, which is frequently not who the org chart suggests. Days two to four are analysis against your real data. Day five is the write-up.
Total time from your team is around six hours, mostly in the first day. We do not need a project sponsor, a steering committee, or a workshop.
Fifteen to twenty-five pages. Findings ranked by cost and effort, each with the evidence attached — the actual duplicate list, the actual timing data, the actual permission grants that conflict. Not observations, counts.
Roughly a third of health checks conclude that the customer does not need new software. Those reports say so in the first paragraph, and we mean it — several have gone on to fix the findings themselves and come back two years later for something else.
Across the checks we have run, four things appear more than anything else: a close whose critical path is a single reconciliation nobody has automated; a duplicate rate in customers or vendors above eight percent; at least one person holding a permission combination that would fail a controls review; and a load-bearing spreadsheet maintained by one person with no documentation.
None of those require an ERP purchase to fix. All of them get worse if you buy one without fixing them first, because a migration carries every one of them across.
The fee is credited against any engagement started within ninety days. That is not a discount device — it exists so that paying for honest advice does not feel like a penalty for having asked.
Where to start
Read-only connections established, four to six conversations with the people who actually do the work. About six hours of your team’s time in total.
Close timing decomposed, data quality counted, permissions evaluated against actual activity, reconciliation coverage tested.
Ranked by annual cost and effort to fix, each with evidence attached rather than asserted.
Ninety minutes walking through it, then the document is yours. No follow-up sequence unless you ask for one.
Questions
One week, written findings, yours whether or not you ever work with us again.