Real businesses.
Real outcomes.

The business had a full-time finance manager on a $150,000 salary. On paper, that looked like a well-resourced finance function. In practice, it wasn’t delivering. The books were being kept, but reporting was thin, decisions weren’t being supported with any real analysis, and the founder wasn’t getting the financial visibility they needed to run the business confidently. The finance manager wasn’t leading — they were processing.

The decision was made to move on from the finance manager. In the process, the business also migrated accounting systems — and the file that came across was a mess. Inconsistent coding, a chart of accounts that had never been properly designed, reconciliations that hadn’t been completed. The foundation that good reporting depends on simply wasn’t there.

LF Advisory came in and started from scratch. We cleaned up the file, rebuilt the chart of accounts around how the business actually makes money, and designed a monthly reporting pack that gave the founder genuine visibility — P&L by segment, working capital movements, margin tracking. Once the foundation was solid, we layered in forecasting, regular advisory meetings and strategic reviews. Everything the founder needed — compliance, reporting, analysis and a sounding board — integrated into a single monthly engagement.

The total cost of the LF Advisory engagement sits at approximately 25% of what the business was spending on its finance manager. The reporting the founder now receives is more detailed, more timely and more useful than anything produced under the previous arrangement. BAS, IAS and compliance are handled. Forecasts are in place. And there’s a monthly conversation about what the numbers mean — something the founder never had before.

The business was growing — revenue was up, the order book looked healthy, and the principal had a reasonable sense of how individual jobs were tracking. Their financial relationship was a once-a-year conversation with their accountant at tax time. What they didn’t have was monthly WIP reporting. The assumption — a common one in construction — was that invoicing to customers broadly equated to profit. It’s a reasonable working assumption, until it isn’t.

When LF Advisory introduced monthly WIP reporting, the gap between invoiced revenue and earned revenue became visible for the first time. A significant portion of what had been treated as profit was not yet earned — costs to complete jobs were still outstanding, and the WIP position had never been properly reconciled. The jobs themselves, once reviewed, were broadly okay. Margins on the work were broadly where they needed to be, and the principal’s instinct on that front was largely correct. The problem was elsewhere. Debtor balances that had been left to age. Overheads that had crept up without anyone tracking them against revenue. Provisions that should have been taken in prior years but hadn’t been. The conversations a good advisor should have been having throughout the year — about debtors, overhead recovery, provisions, and where the business was actually sitting — had been pushed to tax time. And at tax time, some of them weren’t happening at all.

We worked through the historical issues methodically — with the principal and key members of the team — to understand where the leaks were, quantify the exposure, and build a clear plan to address them. That meant difficult conversations, but they were conversations grounded in data rather than instinct. Once the historical position was understood, we shifted focus forward: identifying the drivers of profitability, setting benchmarks by job type, and building a forecasting model that gave the business a real target to work toward.

The business has returned to profitability. The leaks that had been quietly draining margin for years have been identified and, one by one, addressed. The team now has visibility into job performance in real time — not 12 months after the fact. And based on the forecasting work currently underway, the business is on track for what would be a record sales and profit year — built on a foundation that actually holds up to scrutiny.