What is hiding in my figures?

Most owners have a file and a feeling that something is in it. The feeling is usually right, and it is usually not where they are looking.

Send the file. We analyse it first and charge afterwards, if at all.

#How it works

1  you send a file            management accounts, annual accounts, a quote
2  we check we can read it    every subtotal has to add up, or we ask
3  we run the analysis        free, and before any payment screen exists
4  you see what we found      the total, the count, and the largest finding
                              in full, with its arithmetic
5  you decide                 €9 unlocks the rest, or you walk away

Step three happens before step five on purpose. You are not buying a promise that something is in there, you are looking at one of the findings with the sums attached and deciding whether the others are worth nine euros.

#What the free half looks like

We found €57,600 across 2 findings in your file. Here is the largest one
in full, so you can check the arithmetic before you decide.

1. You recover 55.5% of your outbound freight from customers.
   Worth:  €36,400 (2026 trend).
   Do:     Reprice the freight line to cost, or set a free-shipping
           threshold above your current average order value.
   Check:  €81,800 of cost against €45,400 recovered is 55.5%.
           Full recovery is worth €36,400.

Still locked (€9 for all of them):
  2. IT costs against budget

That is a real finding from a real Dutch wholesaler. The locked line names the subject and never the amount, because the amount is the finding.

#The €90 floor is a mechanism, not a policy

If the engine finds less than €90, no payment screen appears:

We read your file and found €0.

That is below the €90 we hold ourselves to, so there is nothing to sell
you and nothing to pay. If you want, send a different file.

This is the part that makes the rest honest. An engine obliged to produce something will produce something. Because a thin result costs us nothing to report, the engine is free to say a file is clean, and "we found nothing" becomes a shippable answer instead of a commercial failure.

No refunds have to be processed, because no money moved.

#What to send, per question

where is my margin leaking     profit and loss for the current period,
                               plus budget or the same period last year

what is my business worth      annual accounts for the last three years,
                               including balance sheets, plus what the
                               owner takes out of the business

is this contract reasonable    the quote or agreement itself, and roughly
                               what volume you do

One file is enough to start. If we need a second one to say something useful, we ask for it by name rather than producing a thinner answer.

#The reading check comes first

Before anything is analysed, every subtotal in your file is added up and compared with what it says. If the arithmetic closes, we read it correctly. If it does not, we name the cell and ask, rather than quietly deciding what you meant.

That is not a formality. On one real set of management accounts it produced the largest finding of the lot: a budget that read €147,200 higher on the reporting tab than on the tab where it had been agreed, with every variance column hanging off the wrong one.

The check is deterministic. No model, no judgement, the same answer every time for the same file. It has been run over twenty-two filed sets of statutory accounts and four real Dutch companies.

#What we do not do

No sector benchmark whose origin we cannot point at. No authoritative-looking percentage that came from nowhere. Where we state a limit it is one that defends itself, like full recovery on a cost you bill on.

And no figure resting on an assumption without the assumption printed beside it. An amount you cannot re-derive is an amount you cannot act on.