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When reviewing expenses, a pair occasionally shows up — same vendor, same amount, two entries in different months. Sometimes it's a legitimate deposit and final payment; other times it's a duplicate that slipped through. Without a system that flags it on entry, it surfaces only at year-end close.
The monthly close arrives as a PDF or an Excel file. The lines tie out, the totals match — but tracing a specific number back to its source (an invoice, a contract, a posting) isn't possible without an e-mail or a phone call. Decisions are then made at the level of the totals, not the underlying detail.
Management keeps its own monthly view in Excel, while accounting produces its outputs from the accounting software. At meetings, the two versions diverge by 10–20% because they're built from different inputs at different points in time. The discussion then turns to which number applies, instead of what to do about it.
November is when decisions get made about dividends, investments, or bonuses — and the question is how much corporate income tax the company will owe for the year. Without months closed on a rolling basis, a reliable estimate isn't available until January, after the year-end accounting entries are booked. Q4 decisions are then made without a number to anchor them.
Monthly results keep shifting for months after the initial close — late documents surface, postings get corrected, items that were missed earlier get booked. Even months considered closed sometimes move by a material amount after the fact. Reporting and decision-making become difficult when a result that looked settled can later turn out to be different.
Each entity in the group keeps its own books, and consolidation is built by combining exports in Excel. Intercompany transactions are matched manually, and small balance differences get carried forward from one month to the next. The consolidated statement exists, but confidence in its accuracy isn't where it needs to be.
The investor uses one template, the bank wants outputs in another structure, and the auditor expects a third. Each month, the same data gets clicked through into three separate documents by hand. Preparing reports for external recipients takes two to three days of work that adds nothing to the close itself.
A current view of bank balances and expected cash flows gets prepared whenever someone needs it — before a meeting, before a purchase decision, before a request from the bank. The spreadsheet is rebuilt from scratch each time, because between uses no one had a reason to keep it current for several months back.
This year's plan was prepared in January and hasn't been updated since. Marketing is over budget, sales is behind plan, but a single view of where the full year is heading doesn't exist. Decisions on further spending are then made without an ongoing comparison against the plan.
The annual budget was put together in January in a single spreadsheet. After the first quarter, active work on it stopped, and today it isn't easy to say whether the company is 10% above or below plan. Investment decisions get made without comparing them to what was agreed at the start of the year.
Invoices, contracts, and internal documents arrive in mixed form — some by e-mail, some on paper. The paper archive grows over time, and finding a specific document means going through binders by hand. In day-to-day work, audits, and inspections, preparing the underlying records then takes days rather than hours.
Today, an invoice is typically approved by a single person — often whoever has capacity at the moment. For purchases over €5,000 and payments over €10,000, it makes sense to have multiple approvers clearly defined. Without an established process, work gets harder and visibility into approvals is lost. As a result, it becomes difficult to demonstrate that a purchase actually went through the required controls.
Goods and services are ordered by e-mail or verbally, with no formal purchase order in the system. The commitment hits the books only when the invoice arrives, which means there's no visibility into where the company stands on a running basis. Above 200 documents a month, controlling spend without purchase orders becomes difficult.
The VAT return gets closed just before the filing deadline, often without all the supporting documents in hand. Issued and received invoices are tracked down after the fact, and amended VAT returns get filed repeatedly. The company has already incurred several smaller penalties, and there's now a real risk that the situation triggers a tax audit.
The balance sheet shows €450,000 in receivables and €380,000 in payables — but the breakdown by age, by counterparty, or by likelihood of collection isn't available in a few clicks. When deciding on payments and collections, this view is needed in seconds, not after an e-mail request.
Invoices arrive by e-mail — some as attachments, some pasted into the body of a message. After a few weeks no one can tell whether a particular document came in or got buried in another thread. With 200+ documents a month, a few of them surface only at month-end close — or not at all.
Sales into other EU countries call for a choice between several regimes: intra-community supply, OSS, IOSS, or reverse charge. The right answer depends on the type of customer, the type of goods, and the country of delivery. If the wrong regime is applied at the time of posting, corrections tend to surface only a year later — including amendments to returns across multiple periods.
The holding invoices its subsidiaries, and the subsidiaries invoice each other — for management services, licenses, and intercompany loans. Once the statutory thresholds are exceeded, transfer pricing documentation becomes a legal requirement. In many groups this documentation doesn't formally exist, and during a tax audit it's among the first records requested.
The Tax Office has issued a notice opening an audit, with a deadline as soon as next week. Alongside day-to-day work, it isn't easy to pull together a complete set of records in such a short time — postings, contracts, intercompany transactions, transfer pricing. An audit calls for separate, focused preparation, ideally led by someone who has been through these proceedings before.
For the first time, the company has crossed the statutory thresholds that trigger a mandatory audit. The auditor will start work in a few months, but the preparation itself — chart of accounts, supporting documentation, tangible and intangible assets, accruals and prepayments — needs to happen well in advance. Without prior experience of an audit, the scope and sequence of steps are difficult to estimate on your own.
Two years ago the company had twenty people and a single entity — today it's eighty people, two entities, and a third one in preparation. The volume of documents, payroll, intercompany transactions, and reporting requirements has multiplied in that time. A setup that worked well for years is no longer keeping pace with what the company needs from its monthly operations as it grows.
The company is considering buying a competitor or another business. Before signing, the deal calls for due diligence, an assessment of quality of earnings and working capital, and modeling the earn-out. For transactions of this size, the scope offered by large advisory firms is typically oversized relative to what's needed — the gap is a partner who delivers the work at the right scope and at the right price.
The founder is planning to retire within the next one to two years, and the next generation is taking over the leadership of the company. A clean handover calls for tidy results, a clear legal and ownership structure, and documentation that stands up in front of family co-owners, the bank, and a potential buyer. Part of the agenda has historically been handled less formally than the new situation requires.
Six months ago the company drew down a loan, and the agreement requires regular reporting — debt service coverage ratio, debt-to-EBITDA, liquidity ratios. The bank originally accepted a quarterly cadence and has now moved to monthly. Standing up a process that delivers verified numbers in the required structure each month is a separate task on top of the regular close.
Closing the funding round also changed the expected reporting cadence. The investor is waiting for a monthly board pack — results, key metrics, operating cash flow, and remaining runway. Until now the company has worked with quarterly outputs, and a separate board pack hasn't yet existed in any standardized form.
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