One week. Fixed fee. A plan you own.
The Finance Automation Review is the way in. It runs against your real processes, ends in a ranked build plan, and is deliberately written so that anybody can quote against it — including someone who is not us.
Long enough to see the real process. Short enough to be a decision, not a project.
A two-hour workshop produces a plan built on how people describe their work. That description is always tidier than the work. The exceptions get left out, the workarounds do not get mentioned, and the resulting plan automates a process that does not exist.
A three-month consulting engagement produces a better document and a worse decision, because by the time it lands the appetite has gone and the cost of the review has become part of what needs justifying.
A week is the point where you have watched enough real work to be confident and not yet spent enough to be committed.
The week
What happens, in order.
Scope and volumes
Which processes are in view, how many entities, what systems are already in place, and what the actual transaction volumes are. This is the session that stops a plan being built on assumptions.
Observation
We watch the processes being performed, by the people who perform them, on real work. Not a description of the process — the process. The gap between the two is where most of the findings live.
Exceptions and controls
What goes wrong, how often, and who catches it. For each manual step, the question is what check that step was carrying, and what would have to be rebuilt if a machine did it instead.
Options and sequencing
What can be automated with what you already own, what needs building, what needs fixing first, and what should be left alone. Ordered by payback and by dependency, not by enthusiasm.
The plan, delivered
A working session walking through the ranked plan, the reasoning behind the order, and the cost and effort attached to each item. You keep the document.
What is actually in the plan.
- Every process in scope, described as it is actually performed, including the workarounds.
- For each candidate: what would be automated, what would remain human, and what control has to be rebuilt to keep the process as safe as it is now.
- An estimate of build effort and running cost, and the arithmetic behind it, so you can challenge the assumptions rather than accept a number.
- A recommended order, with the dependencies stated — including anything that must be fixed before automation is even sensible.
- An explicit “do not automate” list, with reasons. There is always one.
- Enough specification that a third party could quote against it.
Two things you should know before you engage us.
This service line is new. The practice has been ACCA-licensed and running for years; this packaged offer has not. We are not going to dress that up with case studies that do not exist or statistics we cannot evidence. What we can point to is the qualification, the professional obligations we work under, and the plan itself — which you can judge on its merits before committing to any build.
The first engagements are priced accordingly. Early clients are worth more to us as a reference than as revenue, and the fee reflects that. If that arrangement suits you, say so on the call.
Common questions
How much of our time does it take?
Roughly half a day in total from the people who actually perform the processes, spread across the week, plus a short kick-off and the closing session. We work around your close timetable rather than through it. If a week is genuinely impossible we would rather move the dates than compress the observation, because watching the real process is the part that makes the plan worth having.
Do you need access to our systems?
Read-only access is helpful for volumes and exception rates, but it is not a condition. A great deal can be established from watching the process, sample documents and exports you already produce. Where access is granted it is read-only, time-limited, and revoked at the end.
What if we already know what we want to automate?
Then the Review is mostly a sequencing and feasibility exercise, and it is worth saying so at the outset so we scope it accordingly. It is also worth knowing that the process a business names first is frequently not the one with the shortest payback — usually because the loudest process is the most annoying rather than the most expensive.
Are we committed to having you build it?
No. The plan is written to be handed to anyone — your own IT team, an existing supplier, or us. It is deliberately specific enough to be quoted against by a third party. If it were not, it would be a sales document rather than a plan.
What does it cost?
A fixed fee agreed before we start, scoped to the number of processes in view and the number of entities involved. There is no hourly billing and no variation once the scope is agreed.
Book the first call.
Thirty minutes, nothing prepared, no system access. We will tell you whether a Review is worth doing at all — and if the honest answer is no, that is what you will hear.