Cases

The same pattern four times, a different number each time.

The first case comes from my employment at Home of People and is named. The three client cases below it are anonymised on request.

€70M → €150M

budget cycle and dashboards across five business units

Client: Home of People · own employment

The situation: Revenue grew from €70M to €150M, partly through acquisitions. Two existing and three newly acquired business units had to move to the same rhythm and the same definitions while the organisation was still shifting.
Approach: Rolled out the budget cycle across all five business units
Implemented Power BI and developed the front end further, with financial and operational data in one view
Anchored the dashboards in daily operations, reward structures and monthly reporting
Set up internal controls for back office and finance, and coached the team to run them
Implemented ESG and CSRD reporting, with every stakeholder at the table
Result: Every business unit steered on the same definitions and the same rhythm, with one set of dashboards that was genuinely used. This is the experience my approach is built on.

of annual revenue recovered

Client: Medical company · anonymised

The situation: Revenue lagged behind what operations appeared to produce, but nobody could point to where the gap was. Invoicing was partly manual, against lists that were never connected to the operational records.
Approach: A short risk analysis of the invoicing process, from delivered service to sent invoice
An automated reconciliation laying delivered orders next to invoicing, every day
Data sources connected, making pricing and productivity visible per contract
Result: Five percent of annual revenue turned out never to have been invoiced: recovered once and closed for good, landing almost entirely in EBITDA. Connecting the sources also exposed over- and underpriced contracts, direct input for the price negotiations.

2 days

a week freed up

Client: B2B services company · anonymised

The situation: The finance team spent days each month preparing invoices and manually reconciling subledgers. Error-prone work that never seemed to end.
Approach: Mapped the monthly process: which steps really need a human?
Automated invoicing and reconciliations with reusable Python scripts
Trained the team to run and adjust the scripts themselves
Result: Two working days a week back for the team, now going into analysis instead of retyping. The scripts still run, without me.

€60M+

staffing agency, acquisition-ready

Client: Staffing agency · anonymised

The situation: An acquisition was on the horizon. The monthly numbers were broadly right, but the substantiation and the controls around them were not at the level a buyer expects.
Approach: Reviewed the monthly close on reconciliation, substantiation and timeliness
Set up internal controls on the points a buyer looks at first
Raised the quality of the numbers and put the file in order
Result: The acquisition completed successfully. More importantly for the organisation itself: the monthly numbers became internally useful too, because the argument about accuracy was off the table.

Recognise any of this?

The numbers differ, the pattern rarely does. Half an hour is enough to tell whether something similar is going on at your company.