What we learn running finance functions for owner-led businesses, portfolio companies, and family offices — written for the people who have to make the decisions.
Most owners treat an audit as a cost of doing business and a QoE as something that happens to them during a sale. Handled properly, each one tells you things about your company that no internal report ever will.
How Drs. Elisa Mello and Ramin Tabib went from a 700 square foot suite to a 2,500 square foot flagship on Fifth Avenue, financing closed September 2024, doors opened December 2025, funded at one hundred percent. The capital stack, and what the practice is building next.
Companies do not outgrow their accounting software. They outgrow the absence of a design. How we sequence a finance stack that still works at three times the revenue.
Most owners negotiate hard on multiple and barely glance at the working capital peg. It is usually the second-largest number in the deal, it is settled after you have signed, and it is where unprepared sellers lose real money.
Your P&L tells you what happened. Your balance sheet tells you where you stand. Neither tells you whether you can make payroll in nine weeks. That is a different report, and most companies do not run it.
A balance without a schedule behind it is an assertion. Six schedules carry most of the weight in any review, audit, or diligence process, and building them properly the first time removes the scramble entirely.
Most owners have been told their books are "on accrual." That is usually true and usually not sufficient. The gap between accrual bookkeeping and full GAAP is where diligence findings live, and an M-1 schedule is how you keep both sets of numbers honest.
Year-end is not a bigger version of a monthly close. There is a set of annual-only items that most owner-led companies discover late, usually when someone external asks for them. The full checklist follows.
The working files behind the schedules we build for clients. Formula-driven, multi-entity, and structured the way an auditor or a buyer expects to receive them.
Audit-ready fixed asset register. Straight-line and accelerated side by side, multi-year accumulated depreciation, and a book-to-tax difference column that feeds your M-1.
DownloadMulti-entity prepaid register with coverage periods, monthly amortization, and a twelve-month roll-forward that ties to your balance sheet.
DownloadThirty minutes with Konstantinos — not an associate. No pitch: you will leave the call with our read on what to fix first, whether or not you engage us.