Definitions nobody agreed
One company puts hosting in cost of revenue, another in opex. Both defensible, and the portfolio gross-margin comparison is meaningless until somebody normalises by hand.
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A parallel ledger that reconciles to your existing system every morning — to the penny, per account, per period.
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Consolidated reporting in eleven days, without leaving the accounting system they already ran.
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The operating partner problem is not information scarcity — every company reports something. It is that eight companies report differently, on different days, on definitions nobody agreed, so the portfolio view is assembled by an analyst and every board pack is a reconciliation exercise.
184 consecutive days tied · variance $0.00
The situation
One company puts hosting in cost of revenue, another in opex. Both defensible, and the portfolio gross-margin comparison is meaningless until somebody normalises by hand.
Companies can close differently. They cannot report on different days without the portfolio view always waiting for the slowest.
A $40M company with a strong controller and a $12M one with a bookkeeper cannot be held to one standard without doing something about the second.
Portfolio reporting maintained in a workbook by one person, which is a key-person risk sitting on top of the numbers the LPs see.
Two years of implementations, distracted management teams, and at least one failure that becomes the reason the programme stops.
Normalisation done for diligence is thrown away rather than captured, so the next transaction starts from scratch.
The instinct is a platform mandate. It is coherent, and in a mid-market portfolio it reliably takes two years, distracts management teams who have growth targets, and produces at least one failed implementation that becomes the reason the rest stalls.
The alternative is a layer above whatever each company runs. Each keeps its ledger; a shared model reads all of them into one set of definitions, with the mapping captured per company once and maintained rather than rebuilt quarterly.
Two places. Underperformance surfaces earlier — when every company reports on the same definitions on the same day, a margin drift at company four is visible in month two rather than at the annual review.
And diligence, at both ends. An add-on arrives with its own chart and normalising it is a mapping exercise. At exit, consolidated statements that trace to source transactions turn a quality-of-earnings exercise from weeks of reconstruction into a data-room link, and reviewers price uncertainty rather than arguing about it.
Some will, and the reporting layer makes that visible rather than hiding it. A company on QuickBooks Desktop with four entities and a fifteen-day close is a genuine constraint. But it becomes a targeted decision about one company with a clear business case, rather than a mandate applied to seven companies that did not need it.
We do implementation and rescue work as a service, on their existing systems as well as ours, which means the recommendation is not automatically our platform.
Questions
Tell us how many companies and what they run, and we will scope what standardising actually takes.