A representative audit. Three sessions, seven systems, ten business days. Every material workflow mapped across people, systems, exceptions and controls — with value quantified separately as capacity, cash, recurring financial impact and risk.
10 business days and three scheduled sessions, with limited preparation outside them. The controller sponsors the work, then AP, accounting and systems walk through what they actually do. Outputs: process and time map, workflow ranking, ROI baseline, and a build plan priced from what it finds.
Total identified manual hours, split between what automates and what stays human.
At a $70 fully loaded rate the automatable half is about $395,000 of capacity, or 2.7 full-time equivalents. See the note below before using that figure.
The largest opportunities rarely sit inside one system. They sit in the handoffs between the ERP, CRM, billing platform, planning tools, bank data and spreadsheets — a reconciliation finishes in the ERP, gets exported to a spreadsheet, emailed for review, then typed into a tracker.
Those gaps produce three different kinds of loss: experienced people executing repeatable work, cash waiting inside broken processes, and financial risk hidden in manual controls. They are economically different and this audit quantifies them separately.
None of that work sits inside a system, which is why adding another platform moves it rather than removing it. Nothing in this build replaces the ERP, the close software or the spreadsheets. It removes the manual steps between them.
Deliberately light. The controller knows where the time goes, so the work is depth in one room rather than a tour of the org chart.
Recorded and tagged · everything else runs async
Checklists, policies, exports and working files indexed together.
Indexed and queryable
Core finance systems, the warehouse, and the spreadsheets three teams quietly depend on, mapped as one graph.
Connected as one operating graph
Workflows are ranked across five dimensions: capacity returned, cash accelerated, leakage prevented, control or risk improvement, and implementation feasibility. The build sequence follows total economic value, not hours alone. The capacity dimension is shown in full below; the other pools are quantified in the value bridge that follows.
| Workflow | Manual hrs/yr | Automatable | Recovered | Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AP and invoice processing | 2,180 | 68% | 1,482 | $103,700 |
| Bank and account reconciliation | 1,940 | 64% | 1,242 | $86,900 |
| Close checklist and status tracking | 1,460 | 52% | 759 | $53,100 |
| Revenue schedules and billing | 1,720 | 45% | 774 | $54,200 |
| Expense and procurement approvals | 1,220 | 55% | 671 | $47,000 |
| Reporting and board package assembly | 1,880 | 38% | 714 | $50,000 |
| Total | 10,400 | 54% | 5,642 | $394,940 |
Variance commentary and the board narrative are deliberately absent. The preparation underneath them automates. The judgment does not. Automating a finance leader's own analysis is how these projects get rejected.
Capacity is the pool most easily counted, and the smallest. Two others are larger in a business of this size, and both are quantified separately because they are not the same kind of money.
Invoicing accuracy, collections prioritisation, dispute routing and cash application move DSO. At $115M revenue, one day of DSO is about $315,000 of cash. A two- to five-day improvement releases $630K–$1.58M.
This is cash released once, not annual earnings. It improves the balance sheet and liquidity; it does not add $1.58M to EBITDA, and a CFO will make that distinction immediately.
Billing, collections and dispute workflows that preserve 0.10%–0.25% of revenue are worth $115K–$288K a year at this scale. Unlike capacity, this one is recurring P&L value.
Ranges of this kind should only be claimed where the underlying workflow has been examined. In this worked example they are illustrative of the method, not a promise.
Faster close, traceable inputs, documented approvals and audit evidence produced as a by-product of the work. Deliberately not monetised. Risk reduction is real but should not be presented as realised cash unless it is measurable.
| Value category | Illustrative impact | Kind of value |
|---|---|---|
| Annual capacity returned | $395K | Deferred cost, not cash |
| Working capital released | $630K–$1.58M | One-off cash release |
| Annual leakage prevented | $115K–$288K | Recurring P&L |
| Faster close and better controls | Not monetised | Risk |
| First-year quantified impact | $1.14M–$2.26M | Mixed — see above |
The pools are additive only in the sense that they land in the same year. They are not interchangeable, and presenting them as one number is how these business cases fall apart under scrutiny. Separating them is what makes the total credible.
Scale matters more than any assumption here. The same three-day DSO improvement at a $400M business releases roughly $3.3M, because the cash pool scales with revenue while the capacity pool scales with headcount.
Saved hours are not saved cash. Nobody's salary changes because a reconciliation runs itself, and a CFO will say so in the first thirty seconds.
What moves is the next hire. 5,642 hours is 2.7 full-time equivalents, so a team carrying two open finance reqs can leave both open. Depending on the roles and loaded cost, leaving two planned positions open preserves approximately $240,000–$290,000 of annual budget, and unlike an efficiency claim it survives scrutiny.
The number a board actually notices is different again. Nine days to five. Reporting that lands while decisions are still open is worth more than the labour line and much harder to put a figure on.