Duplicate master records
Median 8.4% in vendors and 6.1% in customers. Every client believes theirs is cleaner; three of seventy-four actually were.
Partners
You inherit a finance function every few months and spend the first six weeks finding out what is actually wrong with it. That diagnosis is the same each time, it is mechanical, and it can be done in a week from read-only access.
Tell us your book size and what you keep finding. We will say whether a standing arrangement fits.
Partners
Measured across 74 diagnostics, these recur at similar rates regardless of industry, size, or which accounting system the client runs.
Median 8.4% in vendors and 6.1% in customers. Every client believes theirs is cleaner; three of seventy-four actually were.
31% of companies had at least one closed period where the trial balance did not tie, usually by a small amount, usually unnoticed for years.
64% had at least one, and in most cases nobody could say which without checking.
A median of 22% of transactions carry no department, location, or project — concentrated in older periods, which is why year-over-year comparison quietly fails.
Median 340 accounts of which 38% have had no activity in three years. Most of the excess is dimensions encoded as accounts.
A consolidation, revenue schedule, or allocation model that one person understands and the board relies on.
A diagnostic takes about a week from read-only access and roughly six hours of the client’s time. It produces written findings with evidence attached — the actual duplicate list, the actual timing data, the actual permission grants that conflict — rather than observations.
For you that means walking into a new engagement with the diagnosis already done, which changes what the first month is for. Instead of finding out what is wrong, you are deciding what to do about it.
Fractional CFOs tend to carry a playbook and re-implement it client by client, in whatever system each one happens to run. The mechanics differ every time even though the intent does not.
Where several of your clients run on a common layer — dimensional reporting, consolidation, AP automation — the playbook stops being re-implemented and starts being configured. Close checklists, approval thresholds, reporting packs, and margin models carry across rather than being rebuilt.
We are not claiming this suits every client. A single-entity business at $4M with a clean QuickBooks file does not need us, and we would tell you that rather than take the referral.
Roughly a third of our health checks conclude that no new software is needed and the real problem is a process, a data quality issue, or one missing integration. Those reports say so in the first paragraph.
That is worth knowing before you refer someone. A recommendation that arrives with a “you do not need this” option attached is more credible to a client than one that always concludes in a purchase, and it protects your position rather than ours.
Disclosure to the client is required. If you receive a fee, they must be told, and we will confirm that with you. Given that a fractional CFO frequently holds something close to a fiduciary position with a client, this is the one term we will not waive.
Where you carry several clients, we will set up a standing arrangement so a new engagement can be assessed in week one rather than week six — read-only connection, written findings within five business days, at a fixed rate agreed in advance. The findings belong to the client rather than to us, and they are useful to you whether or not anything follows.
Questions
The diagnosis is the same every time and it is mechanical. That is exactly the kind of work worth not doing by hand.