05 — Transform
Most finance transformations fail quietly.
They do not blow up. They go live, nobody trusts the numbers, the old spreadsheet comes back out, and eighteen months later the business is running two systems and believing neither. We run these as scoped mandates with a Chartered Accountant accountable for the result, not as a software project with a finance stakeholder.
The pattern
Four ways it goes wrong, and none of them are technical.
Nobody owns the numbers
The implementer owns delivery, the vendor owns the software, and no named person owns whether the trial balance is right on the other side. So it isn't.
The old process is rebuilt
The new system is configured to reproduce exactly what the old one did, including the workarounds. You pay for a migration and receive your existing problems at higher cost.
No parallel run
Cutover happens on a date chosen by the project plan rather than by evidence. When the first close is wrong there is nothing to compare it to.
AI bolted on, uncontrolled
A model is introduced where the output is not verifiable and nobody defined who reviews it. It works until the first material error, and then it is removed entirely.
Scope
What we take on.
Finance systems selection and migration
Requirements written from how the business actually operates, a shortlist tested against your own data rather than a vendor demo, chart of accounts and dimension design, migration, parallel run and a clean first close.
AI adoption, with the controls
Deciding which tasks are safe to automate and which are not, what gets reviewed and by whom, and the audit trail that makes the whole arrangement defensible. The four-part test is set out in our note on where AI belongs.
Restructures and special projects
Entity rationalisation, group reorganisation, cost base reset, carve-outs and the finance workstream of a sale or acquisition. Modelled first, then executed against the model.
Shared services and offshore teams
What to centralise, what to keep close to the business, what to automate instead, and how to run a split team without the handover losses that eat the saving.
Post-merger integration
Two charts of accounts, two close calendars, two sets of policies and two cultures. The finance integration plan, and someone accountable for the first consolidated month.
Process and close redesign
Taking the close from weeks to days by changing the sequence and the dependencies, not by asking the team to work later. The method is in closing the books in five days.
Method
Diagnose, model, run, leave.
Every mandate is scoped and priced in writing before it starts, and every one is designed so that we are not needed at the end of it.
Transformation sits under the project-priced Mandate, usually fixed-fee rather than retainer plus success.
Diagnose
Two to three weeks. What the function actually does today, where the time goes, which numbers are trusted and which are quietly re-derived in a spreadsheet.
Model it
The target operating model, the cost of getting there, the benefit, and the honest downside case. If the business case does not survive the downside, we say so before you spend.
Run it
We hold the workstream rather than advising on it, including the parallel run and the first close on the new basis.
Leave
Documented, systematised, and handed to your team or your own hire. A transformation that needs us permanently was not a transformation.
A meaningful proportion of the transformations we are asked to scope should not happen. The system is not the problem, the process is, and changing software would cost six figures to relocate the same difficulty.
When that is what the diagnostic finds, that is what the report says. It is a cheaper answer for you and a shorter engagement for us, and we would rather give it than sell the larger piece of work.
Scope, timelines and fees are set per mandate and nothing on this page is a quote. Restructures, carve-outs and group reorganisations have legal and tax consequences that must be confirmed with qualified legal and tax advisers before anything is committed to.
Start with the diagnostic, not the software.
A scoped two to three week diagnostic tells you whether the transformation is worth doing, what it costs, and what it returns — before anyone signs a licence.