Reporting arrives too late
Management figures produced six weeks after month end describe a situation you can no longer influence. By the time the number is confirmed, the decision it should have informed has already been taken.
01 · Financial Management
Numbers that arrive early enough to act on.
Most businesses do not have a reporting problem. They have a timing problem. The figures are accurate and they are three weeks too late, so every decision made in between was made on instinct.
01 · The problem
Accurate history is not the same as usable information.
Statutory accounts describe a year that has already been survived. They are a legal obligation, not a management tool, and treating them as one is how businesses discover a problem two quarters after it started.
Cash is watched, not forecast
Checking the bank balance is monitoring, not planning. Without a forward view you find out about a pinch point when it arrives, which is precisely when your options are worst and most expensive.
The pack reports, it does not ask
Twenty pages of accurate tables with no commentary, no variance explanation and no recommendation. Boards stop reading these, and stopping reading is a rational response.
Nobody owns the number
Where reporting is assembled from three systems by three people, small errors compound quietly and confidence in the figures erodes until arguments become about the data rather than the decision.
02 · What you receive
Tangible outputs, on a published cadence.
Everything below is a document or a working model you keep. Nothing here is a workshop whose only record is a photograph of a whiteboard.
03 · How it runs
The first ninety days.
Financial management engagements follow a predictable shape, because the sequence matters: you cannot forecast credibly on a base you have not first verified.
- 01
Weeks 1–2: Establish the base
We reconcile what your systems actually contain, agree definitions for every figure that will be reported, and identify where the current process breaks. Findings are written down, including the uncomfortable ones.
- 02
Weeks 3–6: Build the instruments
The reporting pack, the cash model and the KPI set are built and run in parallel with whatever exists today, so you can see them agree before you rely on them.
- 03
Weeks 7–12: Hand over the cadence
Your team runs the close with us alongside, then runs it without us. If nobody internal can produce next month’s pack, the engagement has not finished.
04 · Is this the right service?
Five signs this is the work you need.
If three or more of these are true, financial management is almost certainly where an engagement should start, whatever else is also wrong.
- You could not say today, without asking someone, what your cash position will be in eight weeks.
- Management accounts arrive more than three weeks after month end, or arrive without commentary.
- Two people in the business would give different figures for the same measure and both would be defensible.
- The budget was built in one week last autumn and has not been revisited since.
- Revenue is growing and you cannot explain, with evidence, why margin is not.
05 · Questions
On financial management specifically.
General questions about fees, timing and how engagements are scoped are answered on the frequently asked questions page.
No, and it is not intended to. Your accountant files statutory accounts and handles tax; your bookkeeper records transactions. We work on the layer above both, turning that record into information you can run the business on. In practice we usually end up making their jobs easier, because a clean close is in everyone’s interest.
Usually not. We work with the ledger you already have and only recommend a change where the current system genuinely cannot produce what you need. A migration is disruptive and expensive, and it should never be the first answer to a reporting problem.
That is a common starting position and not one we treat as a failure. The first fortnight exists precisely to establish what is reliable and what is not. We would rather begin from an honest picture than a tidy one, and nothing you show us in that period is a surprise we have not seen before.
Yes, and the sequence changes when it is. A short-horizon cash view comes first, before any other reporting work, because the immediate question is which obligations fall due and in what order. Tell us at the first conversation if that is the position. It is not something to work up to.
Your team, with documented procedures we write during the engagement. Some clients keep us on a monthly retainer to review and challenge the pack rather than to produce it. Both are legitimate; what is not legitimate is a model only the consultant can operate.
06 · Start the conversation
Tell us what is actually holding the business back.
An introductory consultation is a straightforward conversation about your position and your priorities. No charge, no proposal deck, and no obligation to go further.
- What to expect
- Forty-five minutes with a senior adviser, followed by a short written summary of what we heard.
- What to bring
- Your last set of management accounts, if you have them. If you do not, that is already useful to know.
Vader Barclay ConsultingManagement · Accountancy · Marketing