The close
Every task timed, dependencies mapped, and the critical path identified — because most closes are slow due to two or three blocking steps rather than general inefficiency.
Services
A system migration copies your processes into new software. If the approval chain has four steps that exist because somebody was once burned in 2019, you now have that in a more expensive system, and it has been blessed by a project.
Tell us which finance process frustrates you most. We will map it and time it.
The situation
The processes where redesign reliably returns more than software does.
Every task timed, dependencies mapped, and the critical path identified — because most closes are slow due to two or three blocking steps rather than general inefficiency.
Thresholds set against actual spend distribution rather than round numbers chosen a decade ago. Most approval matrices route far too much to far too few people.
Which controls exist, which are performed, and which are documented but not done. The gap between those three is usually the finding.
Where work waits, where it is re-keyed, and where two people do the same check. Handoffs are where elapsed time accumulates, not where effort does.
Frequently the root cause of reporting problems blamed on the system. A chart designed for a different business fifteen years ago constrains everything above it.
Written down properly, so the process survives the person who has been doing it. This is what makes the rest durable rather than temporary.
When a process is rebuilt in new software, it gets specified, configured, tested, and signed off. Everything about that lends it authority — including the four approval steps nobody can justify and the reconciliation that duplicates one done upstream.
Afterwards it is markedly harder to change, because it is now the configured process in the new system rather than a habit. That is why we push process design ahead of any migration and why we occasionally decline to start an implementation until it has happened.
The typical matrix requires manager approval above $1,000 and VP approval above $10,000, numbers chosen when the business was a third of its current size. Plot actual spend and the result is usually that eighty percent of transactions require an approval that has never once been refused.
Approval that is never refused is not a control. It is a delay with a signature, and it actively degrades the real control by training approvers to click through. Setting thresholds against the actual distribution routes fewer, more meaningful decisions to people who then read them.
Teams describe their close as slow in general. Timed, it is nearly always two or three specific blockers — a reconciliation that must finish before anything else can start, an intercompany step waiting on another entity, an accrual requiring information from someone outside finance.
Fixing those compresses the whole timeline. Optimising everything else moves it by a day and consumes far more effort.
A surprising share of reporting complaints resolve to the chart rather than to the software. Accounts that conflate different things, dimension information encoded in account numbers, and a structure designed for a business that no longer exists.
Restructuring it is unglamorous and it is often the highest-return work available, because every report, every budget, and every comparison sits on top of it.
We sell software, so treat our process advice accordingly. What we can say is that these engagements regularly conclude that no system change is needed, that we price them to be worth doing on their own, and that the deliverable is software-agnostic — it applies whether you stay where you are or move to a competitor.
Where to start
Every step, who does it, how long it takes, what it waits on. From observation and system data rather than from a workshop whiteboard.
The critical path, the approvals that never refuse, the duplicated checks, the handoffs where elapsed time accumulates.
With the people who do the work, not for them. Changes they did not agree to do not survive first contact with a busy month.
Written up properly, then re-timed after a full cycle so the change is demonstrated rather than assumed.
Questions
Tell us the process that frustrates you most. We will time it and show you where the days go.