Budget and Forecasting

 Cost Accounting / Product Pricing

Business Startups

Due Diligence

Interim Controller

Internal Control Reviews

System Documentation

Business Lead – Finance Systems

Budget and Forecasting

We have worked with many companies to develop business plans, and develop operating budgets based on those business plans.  We can work with you to set performance goals, realign incentive and compensation plans to pay for performance goals.  We can develop cash and expense forecasting systems to provide top management with accurate and timely actual vs. plan information that management can use to make critical business decisions.

Decide what you want your company to focus on, and set goals and measure performance with adequate reporting and business plan development.

• Would your business be more valuable if everyone worked toward the goals you have set?

Cost Accounting / Product Pricing

We have extensive work with cost accounting within service industries, particularly insurance and financial services.  This includes product, functional and departmental cost assignments.  MFG has worked heavily in fixed vs. variable costing for product pricing purposes.

• Could you be making incorrect business pricing decisions due to the wrong cost accounting information?

Business Start Ups

We have worked with a number of business start ups.  The key need during start up is that the participants are flexible and have broad skill sets.  One must be willing to roll up their sleeves and take on varied roles.  We can help with Business Plan development, setting up infrastructure to support financial and administrative requirements, setting initial budgets and building forecasting tools which are adaptable to your business needs and key drivers of success.

Most start ups cannot afford to staff for all roles initially.  We can help you as needed by providing our varied skills and experiences to satisfy your needs.  Most importantly, we can initiate business processes and procedures which can be handed off to permanent staff at the right time for you and your team.  You can leverage our knowledge and experience until your team is fully assembled and running.

Would you like to have a capable set of hands that are adaptable to your needs in your business start up?

Due Diligence

Consulting involves being asked to perform many roles.  One must have excellent finance skills as well as have a broad business background.  We can provide investigative and forensic accounting assessments of business operations of a target company.  One must have tact, diplomacy and expertise to be able to identify the key drivers of a potential business acquisition and validate their operating results.  We have performed analysis and evaluations of many business operations and organizations.

• Do you need someone to look under the rocks for the landmines which can turn your “deal” into a “dud”?

 Interim Controller / Part Time Controllership

We have Controllership experience in start up to large company environments.  We have provided temporary interim Controllership services to a number of companies. Our broad business experiences makes engaging us a smooth and successful transition for your firm.

Are you in a situation where you need a “Controller” to help your business today?

• Do you need someone to evaluate your existing accounting and finance function and offer recommendations?
• Do you need someone today for a short term need?
• Do you need someone periodically to assist with higher level planning and strategy, which is missing today?

Internal Control Reviews

We have performed many internal control reviews.  Ideally this effort is performed prior to system design.  Often our work is a result of a surfaced problem, or there is a need to do a completed Internal Control review prior to addressing the need to implement a new system.

Our audit expertise, our financial management and internal control training provide you with a resource that can come in and challenge the adequacy of your internal control environment.

Would you and your Board of Advisers sleep better knowing that you have completed an internal control review of your major financial and operational systems?

System Documentation

We can perform complete and accurate system documentation in combination with an internal control review.  These reviews can be performed for any financial, operational and process driven activity.  Tremendous opportunities to re-engineer and eliminate non-value added time can result from these efforts.

Over the years, systems change, people change, business changes.  The documentation may have been perfect on day one, yet we have found that most systems documentation is not maintained over the years, creating exposures not needed in the Sarbanes-Oxley world.

About the time you need to make changes, you experience a “conversation” where it is clear that there is confusion over how your own systems work.

Periodic maintenance and ongoing documentation must be maintained to provide a working tool and provide confidence and clarity on how things work.

• Do you have any “Bus” people on your staff?

What does that mean?  If any of those folks were hit by a bus or left your company tomorrow, would you have adequate documentation to permit a hand off to the next person, without losses in productivity, or negatively impact your customers?

• If not, you need to have adequate statements of work and systems documentation available to provide training and understanding of your current work flows.

Business Lead – Finance Systems

• Do you have systems and processes in place that were created without any input from your financial team?
• Do you find out after systems are in place, that key balancing, control, and reporting needs were determined to be “out of scope”?
• Are your financial team members stretched to a point where they cannot, or will not, commit a significant amount of their time to participate in a new project?

If any of the answers above are yes, you may need our help.

We have represented the interest of the financial function for many years.

You are probably familiar with the “You can pay me now or pay me later?” expression.  Unfortunately in the Sarbanes – Oxley world, pay me later can have very unfortunate consequences.  Getting things right the first time is a key objective.

Many of our clients have brought us in to take care of the “pay me later”, to clean up and re-engineer controls, reporting, process redesign after the initial implementation.  That is time consuming!

We have also been retained to proactively represent the Finance area in designing Finance business requirements into the process.

Often existing staff know what their jobs are, yet have not had the experience on how to layout detailed, clear, well stated business requirements for the IT team to act upon.

We can be brought in to represent Finance on project teams, or coach existing Finance teams on laying out their requirements.

Bottom Line:  Having proactive participation in upcoming projects will help you sleep at night

We can help!  Call Tim today at 513-474-4428 to discuss how we can help!