Finance systems audit
A finance systems audit with a costed roadmap
About twelve hours a month recovered by two fixes made during the review itself, and a written roadmap with the effort behind each finding quantified: one full-time person's month on purchases, and 304 journal lines that become 24 invoices.
- The starting point
- Purchase orders and receipts lived in one system, bills in another, and the two could not be connected. Revenue sat in the operations app and was reshaped in spreadsheets before it reached the books. Fixed assets were tracked on a sheet and depreciated by hand. In each case the calculation happened outside the accounting system and only its result arrived.
- What we did
- A three-day on-site review and five months of system exports analysed, then a nine-step roadmap across purchases, sales and assets, with each build option costed against the configured alternative.
- The outcome
- About twelve hours a month recovered by two fixes made during the review itself, and a written roadmap with the effort behind each finding quantified: one full-time person's month on purchases, and 304 journal lines that become 24 invoices.
What the review found
A three-day on-site review, then analysis of five months of system exports: every supplier bill, invoice, journal and payment in the period.
- Purchases
- Seven of thirteen process steps happened outside any system. Roughly 176 hours a month went on purchase processing, the equivalent of one full-time person, and 56% of the bills processed carried 1.68% of the spend. Not one of the bills examined carried a recorded approval, because approvals were given by email.
- Sales
- Around 304 manual journal lines a month to record centre collections, nearly three journals for every sales invoice. Money genuinely owed by the centres did not appear in receivables at all, so no aging report showed it and no reminder could be sent.
- Assets
- The largest asset class managed on a spreadsheet, with depreciation computed outside the system. A module already included in the company's plan was being paid for a second time as a separate subscription.
What we recommended
Nine changes across purchases, sales and assets, in a fixed sequence, with the first two as prerequisites. None of it required software the company did not already own, apart from one optional build. Where a build was an option, the report costed it against the configured alternative over three years, by number of users, so the decision could be made on numbers.
- One Procure-to-Pay cycle inside the accounting system, with approval rules by amount and three-way matching of order, receipt and bill
- the swapping centres billed as customers, so roughly 304 journal lines become 24 invoices and receivables become accurate
- the fixed asset register configured so classification and depreciation run automatically
- a wallet arrangement for high-frequency low-value vendors and an OCR route for recurring invoices
- petty expenses moved to a tool that enforces receipts at the point of spend
- the bank connected to the books so payments close the loop inside the system
Delivered during the review
Two fixes were made on the spot. Documents sent from the accounting system had been landing in spam, so part of the sales team was sending them by hand; authenticating the sending domain recovered about twelve hours a month. And a report the finance team had been producing by exporting a 111-column register and deleting columns by hand was built as a saved custom report.
A written roadmap the company can act on in order, with the cost of each step known. The automation phase is proposed and scoped.
The service behind this work: Finance process automation
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