Worked scenario · An SME with no management accounting
The P&L lands five months after the year closes.
A 40-person business working on a job basis. An owner, an executive assistant, an external accountant, and no management accountant: the role was costed, then dropped. Here is a full engagement that installs the chain without installing the headcount.
The company
- Size
- 40 staff, one owner, one executive assistant, no internal finance function
- Business
- Services and works billed per job, around a hundred jobs open at any time
- Current reporting
- An external accountant, annual accounts delivered in the spring, a job-tracking spreadsheet
- Tools in place
- Quoting and invoicing software, partial timesheets, purchasing in another tool, banking, outsourced payroll
- What is missing
- No known margin per job, and no figures at all between two year-ends
The starting point
The owner steers by the bank balance and the order book. Both are good indicators, but they measure cash and activity, not profitability: a company can have a full order book, a comfortable bank balance, and lose money on half its jobs without knowing it.
The P&L for a year closing in December lands in the spring. By then the information is five or six months old. It serves to file, not to decide: the jobs that went wrong finished long ago, and the ones running now are not in it.
Between year-ends, any precise question triggers a manual reconstruction. The bank asks for an interim position, a client asks where a job stands, the accountant asks for figures: two days of gluing exports together, every time, and a result nobody can recompute.
The word has already been said internally: we need a management accountant. The cost of a full-time role ended the discussion, and the subject comes back every six months without ever landing.
What the audit puts on the table
- 01
The data already exists, all of it. Quotes, orders, time spent, purchases, invoices, bank entries: everything is captured somewhere. Nothing that follows requires capturing more, only reconciling what already is.
- 02
Time is recorded without a reliable link to the job. That is the blocker for everything else: without that link no margin per job can be computed, however good the rest is.
- 03
There is no analytical chart of accounts being maintained. Entries are not allocated, so even the accountant can produce nothing beyond a single overall result.
- 04
Purchases charged to a job and general overheads are not separated. Until the allocation rule is written down, two people will compute two margins on the same job, and both will be right.
- 05
The accountant receives exports reworked by hand. That lengthens their turnaround, increases their hours, and introduces gaps nobody can explain six months later.
- 06
The need is not a headcount, it is a chain: collect, check, compute, report. Three of those four steps are mechanical and can be automated. The fourth, the analysis, stays human.
What gets built, week by week
- Weeks 1-2
Connectors and ingestion
Quoting and invoicing, timesheets, purchasing, bank statements, payroll data. Incremental, idempotent ingestion with retry on failure. By the end of the second week, nobody exports a file to build a report.
- Weeks 3-4
Warehouse and analytical model
A historised warehouse, and a model that names your business: job, client, phase, time spent, charged purchase, invoice, payment. The analytical chart of accounts is held by the system rather than in somebody's memory, and recorded time is tied to its job.
- Week 5
The definitions, settled with your accountant
One session with the owner and the accountant, together: what the margin on a job is, what is charged to it, how overheads are allocated, when revenue is recognised. Each rule is written down and implemented once. Bringing the accountant into that session avoids the worst outcome: two parallel truths inside the same company.
- Weeks 6-7
The monthly position
Revenue, margin by job and by client, order book and work still to deliver, payroll, a thirteen-week cash forecast. Available in the first days of each month, with every figure carrying its source and its last sync time.
- Weeks 8-9
The pack for the accountant
The items they ask for each month or quarter are produced automatically, already reconciled and allocated against the chart defined in week 5. They receive a usable pack instead of exports to rework: their turnaround shortens, and the unexplained gaps disappear.
- Weeks 10-12
Alerts and questions
A job whose margin drops below its threshold while it is still running, a client whose outstanding balance exceeds its limit, a gap between a job's budget and its actuals. Plus the ability to ask a question in plain language on a written scope, with the executed query shown under the answer.
What it changes
Result available
Annual accounts, in the spring
A monthly position in the first days of the following month
Margin per job
Unknown, estimated by feel
Computed, and tracked while the job is still running
Answering the bank or a client
Two days of reconstruction
The information is already there, with its source
Figures for the accountant
Exports reworked by hand
A reconciled, allocated pack, produced automatically
Definition of margin
Two people, two calculations
One written rule, implemented once
The management accountant role
Costed, then dropped for budget
The chain runs without the headcount; the analysis stays yours
These orders of magnitude are what this kind of engagement produces when the conditions below are met. They are not contractual commitments: the pricing for your own situation comes out of the audit.
How long it takes
The breakdown in working days and calendar weeks. The price itself is quoted to you before you commit to each step.
| Audit2 weeks | 5 days | 2 weeks |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation and analytical model7 weeks | 20 days | 7 weeks |
| Monthly position, accounting pack and alerts5 weeks | 17 days | 5 weeks |
| Total14 calendar weeks | 42 days | 14 calendar weeks |
The engagement is decided in three steps: you only commit to the foundation after reading the audit, and to the reporting after seeing the foundation run. Each step is sold at a fixed price, quoted before it starts: if it takes more days than planned, that is on us. The fourteen weeks are calendar time, not full time: the working days are spread across them. On top of that come the monthly infrastructure cost and an operating fee once in production. You own the code and the credentials.
What would make this scenario fail at your company
Time that is never recorded
If nobody logs their time, or if what is logged is tied to no job, no margin per job will come out. Introducing that habit is a change of practice, not an engineering task: it is prepared with the teams, it takes a few weeks, and it cannot be bought.
Nobody to settle the allocation
The week 5 session assumes the owner will decide how overheads are allocated. That is a management judgement, not a calculation: nobody else can make it, and without it everything downstream floats.
An accountant kept out of it
If they are not part of the definitions, you will end up with correct management figures and correct annual accounts that do not reconcile. Two parallel truths cost more than no figures at all. We work with yours, never instead of them: bookkeeping and statutory accounts are their profession, not ours.
Expecting the system to decide
This chain produces reliable figures and puts them in front of you at the right moment. It does not do the analysis: understanding why a job is slipping, and what to do about it, stays a human judgement. What we remove is the time spent producing the figures, not the time spent looking at them.
The building blocks involved
The data audit
Two weeks at most, a fixed price, and a document that belongs to you. It is the only honest way to know what your data allows before committing a budget to it.
The data foundation
Four to eight weeks for your data to live in one place, historised and reliable. Delivered in usable stages, not in one go six months out.
The AI assistant
An assistant that answers your business questions in plain language, on figures that come out of your own database. It arrives once the foundation is reliable, never before.
The other scenarios
B2B trade and distribution
Monthly revenue lands twelve days after close, stockouts are discovered the day the customer calls, and four tools give four different definitions of revenue.
Manufacturing and after-sales
Four people in after-sales spend their days answering the same six questions: lead time, order status, part compatibility, warranty, documentation, scheduling a visit.
Hotels and restaurants
Occupancy, RevPAR and average spend live in three tools that don't talk to each other, and booking requests that arrive outside opening hours get lost.
Staffing and recruitment
The right person has already worked for the group, but their skill sits inside a PDF CV: the consultant goes off to post an advert instead of calling them back.
Are you steering by the bank balance?
Thirty minutes is enough to know whether your data already allows a margin per job, or what would have to be put in place first. If the answer is that time recording has to come first, we will tell you.