Real businesses.
Real outcomes.

This business had a dedicated finance manager on a $150,000 salary. Systems had been built, software integrated, processes established. What hadn’t been delivered was anything useful to the people actually running the business.

Reporting was scarce. When numbers did appear, they were hard to interpret and disconnected from how the business operated. The finance manager had built a function that worked for the finance manager — not for the owners making decisions day to day.

When the finance manager eventually departed, the business was left with undocumented software integrations, a chart of accounts that didn’t reflect reality, and numbers nobody could verify. They knew the data was wrong. They didn’t know where to start.

LF Advisory was engaged to assess and rebuild. Within the first two months, we identified tens of thousands of dollars in overpaid GST liabilities and tax instalments. That alone covered the cost of engagement many times over before the real work had even begun.

From there, we untangled the integrations, corrected the underlying data, and rebuilt the reporting structure around how this business actually makes money. Monthly reporting went live within days of each month-end. Forecasting was introduced. Processes were put in place for the parts of the business that had been running on instinct.

With accurate information in hand, the picture became clear quickly. Once on-costs were properly accounted for, one division that appeared to be contributing was loss-making — and had been for some time. A broader overhead review found the cost base was still calibrated to a higher-revenue version of the business — overheads that made sense at peak but hadn’t moved as conditions changed. Both were addressed.

They are currently operating in a challenging selling market. Sales volumes are lower than they were. But with a leaner cost base, a cleaner structure, and reporting that flags issues early, profitability has actually improved. They’re making more profit now than they were when revenues were higher. When conditions turn, they’ll be positioned to grow — with real visibility behind every decision.

LF Advisory’s monthly engagement fee represents approximately 20% of what this client was previously spending on a finance manager — while delivering timely reporting, forecasting, compliance and advisory that the previous arrangement never provided.

This builder was growing. Residential and commercial projects, a busy pipeline, and an annual check-in with the accountant that confirmed things were on track. No finance manager, no monthly reporting, no work-in-progress schedule — the kind of setup that works until it doesn’t, and that makes it difficult to see problems forming until they’re already embedded.

Work-in-progress schedules are a standard tool in construction accounting. They match what’s been invoiced against the actual stage of completion on each job — so you can see whether revenue is being recognised too early, whether costs are running ahead of billing, and whether jobs that look profitable on paper are actually performing. Without them, a builder can be sitting on significant losses that won’t show up until a project closes, sometimes long after anything can be done about it.

When LF Advisory introduced monthly reporting, things that had been quietly accumulating came to the surface. Bad debts sitting on the books for years, never written off. Overheads that had grown past what the business could sustain. These aren’t unusual problems — but they needed to be faced, and they hadn’t been.

The early conversations weren’t always easy. But the owner engaged directly with what was in front of them, and that made everything else possible. We worked through it together — finding the leaks, sizing up the damage, and getting a clear picture of where things actually stood.

Running alongside all of this is the QBCC reporting. The obligations don’t always sit neatly with the management accounts, and keeping both accurate — while actively managing the ratios that matter for licensing — is something we take care of as part of the engagement.

The tone of meetings now is very different. Because the hard discussions happened early, there’s a general optimism about where the business is heading — conversations have moved from dealing with problems to planning for what’s next. Finding and working through these issues when we did changed the trajectory of the business. Another year without the right reporting in place, and the conversation wouldn’t be about record profits — it would be about damage control. Instead, current forecasting points to the next financial year being the highest revenue and most profitable in the business’s history.