Consulting & AdvisoryFree
Consulting Business Case Built on the Ledger
Every benefit mapped to a line in their chart of accounts, transfers separated from real savings, and a breakeven value on every assumption.
River builds the value model from the client's own ledger rather than from a benchmark. Every benefit line names the account code it lands in, the cost centre that holds it, and whether it is a real reduction or a transfer between codes. Costs carry their treatment, so the case shows what hits this year's operating profit and what is capitalised and depreciated. Then every assumption gets a breakeven value: the number at which the case stops clearing their hurdle.
Search the query and you get a workbook. Cost, benefit, net present value, payback, and three columns labelled conservative, base and optimistic. The arithmetic was never the difficulty. The difficulty is that a consultant's benefit column is written in the consultant's vocabulary, and the CFO has to find those numbers somewhere in a general ledger organised by account code and cost centre. Nothing on page one crosses that gap, which is why a defensible diagnostic dies in a finance review it should have survived.
Written for the consultant whose recommendation now needs a number, and for the fractional operator taking a case to a board. Run it after the diagnostic is done, once you know what you are asking them to do. The baseline comes from the normalized trend and version bridges, the recommendations from a register where each one traces to a cause, and the levels being closed from a rubric with anchored criteria.
A transfer between codes is not a saving
Federal appraisal guidance is blunt about this. There are no economic gains from a pure transfer, because the benefit to whoever receives it is matched by the cost borne by whoever pays. So transfers are excluded from the net present value and identified separately instead. Consulting produces transfers constantly. Move a shared service into operations and operations shows a cost increase while the centre shows a fall, and the group has saved nothing at all.
Then there is where the spend lands. Whether an amount is an expense or a capitalised improvement turns on published tests. The tax rules ask whether it is a betterment, a restoration, or an adaptation to a new or different use. The same section also lets a taxpayer elect to capitalise repair and maintenance consistently with its own books, so the treatment is partly the client's own choice. That is why the case asks rather than assumes, and why it shows the cash profile beside the operating profit profile.
The last discipline replaces the scenario columns. That same guidance asks for major assumptions to be varied and outcomes recomputed, which is where conservative, base and optimistic came from, and it stops one step short. A CFO does not want three cases. They want to know what would have to be true for this to fail. So every assumption carries its breakeven: the adoption rate, the vacancy fill, the volume, at which the case stops clearing the hurdle they set.
How it works
Send the findings
What you are recommending, and the numbers the diagnostic measured to support it.
Send their numbers
The ledger export, the board pack, headcount by cost centre, the asset register.
Name the hurdle
The payback or return their approval process requires, and the threshold above it.
Take the model
A live sheet their finance team can rerun, and the case written against it.
What you get
- Every benefit line named to an account code and the cost centre that holds it
- Transfers between cost centres identified and kept out of the headline number
- The cash profile beside the operating profit profile, because treatment changes one of them
- A breakeven value on every assumption, against the hurdle rate they actually use
- The baseline drawn from their own ledger, with the periods and the source stated
- A live model their finance team can rerun, with every assumption on the sheet
Common questions
What do I need from the client?
A ledger export at account code level is the best single input, because it lets every benefit be named to a code that already exists. Headcount by cost centre, the fixed asset register and three years of profit and loss cover the rest. Then the hurdle their approval process applies.
They will not release a ledger export. Does it still work?
Yes. The model builds from the board pack, headcount data and whatever coding appears in the management accounts, and it states which benefit lines could not be mapped to a code. Those unmapped lines are exactly what a finance review will challenge, so knowing them in advance is worth more than the export.
How is this different from an ROI calculator?
A calculator asks you to type in a benefit. This one starts from the client's chart of accounts and works back, so no benefit exists until it has a code and a cost centre. The vendor-side version built from what a buyer said on a call solves the sales problem, which is a different problem.
Why does accounting treatment matter to my recommendation?
Because it moves the number the board is measured on without changing a single fact. Capitalising a configuration spend spreads it as depreciation. Expensing the same amount lands all of it in year one. The recommendation is identical and the case can clear or fail the client's own test depending on which happens.
What counts as a transfer, and why is it excluded?
A cost that moves between cost centres, legal entities or budget lines without the group spending less. Recharges, reallocations and shared service uplifts are the common ones. They stay on the sheet and get named, because the receiving manager will notice, and they stay out of the headline because no money was saved.
Can the client's finance team rerun it themselves?
That is the point of shipping it as a live model rather than a picture of one. Every assumption sits on the face of the sheet with its source, so the finance team can change the ramp or the depreciable life and watch the breakeven move. A model they cannot rerun is a model they replace.
Where does this sit in the engagement?
After the diagnostic and before the readout, because the number changes which recommendations you lead with, and the storyline the readout is built on is where that ordering gets decided. It also sets up measurement: the baseline captured here is what the post-engagement check-in tests the actual result against later, since a baseline reconstructed afterward convinces nobody. Intake work is covered by the engagement intake pack.
Consulting Business Case Built on the Ledger
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