Growth
When finance is the thing lagging behind the business.
The work is coming in. The team has grown. And finance is still being done in the evenings, in a spreadsheet, by whoever has capacity. Growth is the whole monthly finance function: the books kept properly, management accounts you can rely on, a rolling view of cash, and margin by project or client. Run in the systems you already have.
Is this the right level?
This is for you if
This is not for you if
What you get
What arrives every period, without you asking
Where you are at day 90
The change you should expect
The first month is about taking the finance work off whoever is currently absorbing it. We put a close timetable in place, produce your first clean month-end, and hand you a written list of what we found on the way through. By the third month, management accounts arrive on a fixed date without anybody chasing them, you can see real margin by project or client, and two or three process fixes have landed. The evening and weekend finance work has stopped.
The second half of the year is where the value moves from tidiness to judgement. You are forecasting rather than reacting, and hiring and pricing decisions get made against a plan instead of a bank balance. Your accountant's year-end is faster and cheaper, because the books were right the whole way through. By month twelve you have a finance function that scales with the business rather than straining against it, and enough history behind you to plan the following year properly.
Before you book
The questions we get asked
Growth consumes cash before it produces profit: more people, more work in progress, more sitting in debtors. Businesses rarely get into trouble standing still. They get into trouble growing without a forecast, and finding out in month nine that the margin on the new work was thinner than the old.
Usually because it was handed over without a process, or because the provider only ever did what it was asked to do. Everything in the monthly list arrives without you asking for it, on a published timetable. If something is going to be late, you hear it from us before you notice.
Often they stay. Bookkeeping is not the same job as management accounting, forecasting or margin analysis, and expecting one person to do all four is where most of these problems start. We will tell you on the call whether the right answer is to bring the work here or to keep your bookkeeper and put Clarity on top.
Almost nobody's is. That is the first month's work and it is included, not billed as a separate project. If it is a bigger job than one month, we tell you before you sign rather than after.
It is, and it buys something different. Your accountant is priced to file your accounts once a year. This is priced to be inside the business every month. If one mispriced job a year costs you more than 19,800 pounds, the comparison is not accountant against accountant.
Bring your last three month-ends.
Thirty minutes. We will tell you what is actually slowing finance down, and whether this is the right level or you would be better served above or below it.
Book a callNot quite right?
