Capabilities · 01 of 04

Your ERP went live. The problems didn't go away.

Most finance teams we meet aren't looking for new software. They have the system. What they do not have is the people to fix what it is doing, or the internal agreement about who owns it.

We diagnose what is actually broken, fix it without a reimplementation, and stay to run it.

Book a 20-minute review How an engagement works

The problem

It is not a software problem

An ERP needs rescuing when finance still closes through workarounds, reconciliations fail repeatedly and the system no longer reflects how the business operates. Replacement is justified only when the current platform cannot support the required operating model.

Between 55% and 75% of ERP implementations fail to meet their original objectives; the range depends on who's counting and how they define failure, but nobody puts it below half. (Gartner)

That statistic gets used to sell replacement systems. In the mid-market it usually means something narrower and more fixable: the system was configured for a business that has since changed, the people who understood it have left, and nobody has had a clear run at it since go-live.

Two things then compound it.

Skills shortages have delayed finance and technology projects across the board, and in some cases cancelled them outright, with technical, data and systems skills specifically named as the constraint. (Robert Half) You cannot fix a system with people you cannot hire.

And in mid-market businesses, stakeholder alignment ranks among the top three challenges finance leaders name; considerably higher than it does in businesses above a billion in revenue. (Grant Thornton) Programmes led by IT create friction with finance, and the work stalls in the gap between them.

Neither is solved by buying something else.

What we do

Four ways in

System Health Check

A fixed-fee audit of the estate you already own.

Four weeks, one deliverable, no obligation to do anything further with us.

We go through the configuration, the integrations, the controls and the workarounds your team has built to get around them. Then we tell you three things: what is genuinely broken, what is merely inconvenient, and what it will cost to close the gap between what go-live promised and what runs today.

The output is written for a board, not for an IT department. It carries a risk register, a run-cost baseline and a sequenced roadmap you can fund in stages.

Most clients arrive here because something specific has gone wrong. Most leave with a longer list than they expected and a clearer sense of which items actually matter.

Remediation & Enhancement

Fix what go-live didn't deliver. Without starting again.

Reimplementation is the expensive answer to a question that usually has a cheaper one. We work on the system you have.

Reports that were promised and never built. Statutory compliance that does not match the jurisdiction. Reconciliations that break every month for the same reason. Approval workflows nobody follows because they were designed around a process that no longer exists. Integrations that fail quietly and get discovered at close.

We work in itemised change programmes: each item scoped, delivered, tested and signed off, so you can see progress and stop whenever the value stops.

Recent workUnivo Education, an education group in India, where the change programme covered statutory e-invoicing with verification, withholding tax handling, a rebuilt payables ageing report, bank reconciliation repair and approval workflows; delivered as tracked items, each confirmed by the client's own finance team.

Managed Run

The finance systems capability you cannot hire.

This is the offer most of our clients end up on, and the one that changes their year.

A senior finance systems person in the UK, Ireland or Singapore is expensive, hard to find, and once hired is one person with holidays, notice periods and a single point of view. Managed Run gives you a team instead, priced against the fully-loaded cost of the hire you have been trying to make.

What it covers

Functional and technical consulting on demand. Query and issue management with committed response times. Bug fixing. Small process changes delivered continuously rather than batched into projects. System monitoring. Periodic system audits, so problems surface before they reach the close.

How it works

You get named people who know your estate, not a ticket queue. Acknowledgement inside a committed window, with an escalation path for anything urgent.

Monthly reporting on what was used and what it went on. Enhanced cover during period-end and year-end, when the load is highest and the tolerance for failure is lowest.

What makes it different from vendor support

Vendor support answers questions about the product. We answer questions about your business because we hold the context of how your entities, processes and integrations actually fit together, and we keep holding it between engagements.

Track recordrun contracts operating continuously for PetCubes, Charles Monat, a global social commerce platform and Oxford Summer Courses across Singapore, the Philippines, Ireland and the UK; several running four years and longer, through multiple system changes and two entity restructures.

Continuous Improvement & Advisory Retainer

For when the system is stable and the business is not.

Systems degrade against a moving business. New entities, new products, new reporting demands, new people who inherit a configuration nobody documented. Left alone, the gap reopens.

This is a standing advisory line and a continuous improvement budget: a regular review of where the estate is drifting from where the business is going, plus the capacity to act on it.

It is also where the harder questions get asked. Is this automation still doing what you think it is? Can your team explain what the system did last month without calling us? Should this process still exist?

Recent workCharles Monat Associates, an international insurance brokerage, where a working but opaque automation layer was rebuilt so the client's own finance team could inspect and change the rules themselves, and the system now reports the decisions it makes.

How we engage

Three stages. You can stop after any of them.

01 · Diagnose

fixed fee, three to four weeks. Architecture, risk, run-cost baseline, roadmap.

02 · Build

scoped programme, billed on milestones. No open-ended day rates.

03 · Run

monthly retainer with committed response. We stay until it runs, then keep it running.

Most clients start with the Health Check. Roughly two-thirds go on to remediation, and most of those move to Managed Run afterwards. None of it is a condition of anything else.

Proof

What this looks like in practice

Two weeks to four days

Charles Monat Associates: ten entities, seven jurisdictions and four currencies consolidated into a four-day close.

Four years and running

PetCubes: continuous support through a production rebuild, warehouse automation, multi-country expansion and controlled agent deployment.

Spending controlled before commitment

Univo Education: procurement approvals, vendor onboarding, statutory compliance and banking brought into one controlled process.

See documented client work →

Questions

Do we have to replace our current system?

Almost never. Reimplementation is occasionally the right answer, but it is the expensive one and it is usually proposed by people who sell implementations. We work on what you have unless there's a clear reason not to.

we are not sure what is actually wrong. Is that a problem?

No. That's what the Health Check is for. Most clients know something is wrong and have a theory about what; the theory is right about half the time.

Our system was implemented by someone else. Will you work on it?

Yes. Most of our remediation work is on estates built by other firms. We are not interested in criticising the original build; we are interested in what it costs you now.

Do you sell the software?

No. We do not resell licences and we take no vendor commissions. What we recommend is what we think is right.

What size of business do you work with?

Mid-market; typically £10m to £150m in revenue, usually with entities in more than one country. Below that, the work rarely justifies our involvement and we will say so.

How quickly can you start?

A Health Check can usually begin within two to three weeks. Urgent remediation, faster.

Start with a conversation, not a proposal

Twenty minutes. Tell us what is breaking and we will tell you whether it is the kind of thing we fix, and if it is not, we will say so.

Book a 20-minute review