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Free self-assessment

Is your financial data ready to automate?

Thirty checks to run before you build a forecast, a dashboard or an agent on top of your numbers. Point any automation at messy books and it will hand you confident, well-formatted, wrong answers — faster than a person ever could.

Takes about ten minutes. Nothing is submitted anywhere — the scoring runs entirely in your browser and your answers never leave your device.

0/30 Start ticking Tick every statement that is true of your books today. Leave the rest.

Severity marks how badly each one distorts your numbers when it is wrong. Critical items break everything downstream — an unticked Critical caps your result regardless of the total.

01 · Chart of accounts and mapping

Does the same cost mean the same thing everywhere?

High Without it, payroll hides under five different names and consolidation becomes a manual mapping exercise somebody maintains by hand and eventually gets wrong.
Medium Duplicates inflate every roll-up quietly, and they are almost never spotted at the summary level where people look.
High Gross margin is the number everyone judges you on. It is only as good as the line beneath it.
High A misclassification here moves gross margin without moving the bottom line, so it survives a profit review untouched.
Medium This is your audit trail, and it is what makes next month take minutes instead of hours.

02 · Consolidation and intercompany

Do your entities cancel out correctly?

Critical Miss them and consolidated revenue is overstated. This is the single most common reason a group's numbers cannot be relied on.
High An asymmetry is a booking error sitting on the balance sheet. It does not resolve itself and it compounds.
High So the group result reflects only real external activity rather than money moving between your own pockets.
High Cash looping between entities is a leading cause of distorted cash flow reporting — the same dollar counted as a movement twice.
High And the translation reserve movement is proved rather than being wherever the difference landed.

03 · Splits and allocations

Can you see cost by function, not just in total?

High A single wages line tells you nothing about cost structure, and it is usually the largest number on the page.
Medium Required for any honest view of profitability by entity, division or site. An undocumented key is an argument waiting to happen.
Medium The basis for any per-product or per-entity result. Bundled receipts are where it usually breaks.
High Partial tagging is worse than none — it produces segment reports that look complete and are quietly missing a third of the data.

04 · Revenue recognition and accruals

The most value-dense section, and the one most often skipped.

Critical Cash-basis revenue creates phantom peaks and troughs. Any trend read off it — and any forecast built on it — is describing your banking, not your business.
Critical Recognising a twelve-month contract on the invoice date overstates the month several times over and is a diligence red flag that reprices deals.
High Expensing a year of insurance or licences in month one creates a cost spike that is not a cost event.
High Missing accruals make a month look more profitable than it was, and the correction lands in a later month that then looks worse than it was.
Medium Commonly missing in younger companies, and it inflates earnings until a lender or a buyer recalculates it for you.
Medium Under NZ IFRS this moves both the balance sheet and the shape of the profit and loss. Getting it wrong distorts every leverage ratio a bank looks at.

05 · Outliers and data integrity

Is anything quietly faking a trend?

High Asset sales, settlements, insurance recoveries and grants distort a forecast badly if they are left sitting in the base.
High Duplicates inflate revenue or cost directly, and a duplicate payment is money actually gone.
High Period mismatches create volatility that looks like a business event and is actually a bookkeeping one.
Medium An anomaly that nobody questioned becomes an assumption in next year's budget.
High An unexplained reconciling item is not a rounding. It is a booking error or a missing transaction that has not been found yet.

06 · Cross-system reconciliation

Do all your systems tell the same story?

Critical The baseline check. If cash does not tie, nothing downstream of it can be relied on and no amount of analysis fixes that.
High The classic mismatch: the gateway reports gross, the ledger records net of fees, and the difference gets booked as a revenue reduction instead of an expense.
High A gap means a pay run never reached the ledger, or a manual journal is wrong. Both are easy to find and easy to miss.
High A mismatch means payments received and unrecorded, or invoices raised outside the ledger. Both corrupt the collections forecast.
High The reconciliation that matters most in New Zealand, and the one most often done once and never repeated. A return that does not tie back is a disclosure problem waiting.

Reading your score

What the number means.

ScoreWhere you areWhat to do next
25–30The foundation holdsBuild the forecast, the reporting and the automation. They will stand on real numbers. Re-run this quarterly — data quality decays.
15–24Solid core, real gapsFix the Criticals before you trust a forecast: cash tie-out, accrual revenue, deferred revenue and intercompany elimination. The rest can follow.
Below 15Your reports are telling you storiesClean the foundation first. Anything automated on top of this will be confidently wrong, and it will be wrong faster than a person would be.
The override. Any unticked Critical caps you regardless of the total. A business scoring 27 with cash that does not tie to the bank is not ready — it is a business with one fatal problem and twenty-nine tidy ones. Fix the four Criticals first, in every case.
A note on where this came from. The structure of this assessment was inspired by a data-readiness checklist published by Fuelfinance, adapted for New Zealand and Australian businesses — Xero and MYOB rather than QuickBooks, NZ IFRS rather than US GAAP, and GST rather than sales tax. The failure patterns described are ones common across finance functions generally, not accounts of any particular client's books.

Why this comes first

Automation does not fix bad data. It scales it.

Every agent, dashboard and forecast is a function of what sits underneath it. Point one at books where revenue is recognised on receipt and intercompany is never eliminated, and it will produce a beautifully formatted, internally consistent, entirely wrong picture — and it will produce it every month, on schedule, with more authority than the spreadsheet it replaced.

That is the real risk in automating a finance function, and it is not a risk anybody markets to you. It is also why every XLCFO engagement opens with a diagnostic over the last closed period in which we fix nothing. The finding is the opening position, and it is usually the most valuable document a client receives in the first quarter.

If you scored below 24 and would rather not work through the remediation yourself, that is the conversation to have. We do this as a fixed-scope piece of work before any reporting or forecasting engagement begins — because there is no point building the second thing on top of a broken first one.

Would you rather we ran all thirty?

We run the diagnostic over your last closed period, fix nothing, and give you the opening findings report — what is unreconciled, what is unsubstantiated, and what it is costing you in decisions made on the wrong numbers.

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