Finance Department Reset: Rebuild the Function in 90 Days

The reset opens with a diagnostic that is deliberately short and deliberately complete. We read the last 24 months of financials, the trial balance, every reconciliation that exists, the bank and loan agreements, the payroll and the aging reports, and the system configuration. We talk to everyone who touches money, including the people outside accounting who enter the orders and approve the invoices.

At the same time we control the immediate risks. Cash is forecast for 13 weeks by the end of week one. Disbursements are reviewed before release. The lender gets a call from a finance leader with a date for the overdue package. Payroll is confirmed funded. The vendor threatening to stop shipments gets a plan. Nothing is rebuilt yet, but nothing is getting worse.

Week two ends with a written assessment: the state of people, systems, process, and controls, ranked by what each failure is costing, and a phased plan for the remaining 76 days. The plan is the contract for the rest of the reset.

Cleanup is the reconstruction of the numbers that decisions depend on: cash reconciled, balance sheet tied to support, subledgers agreed, prior periods corrected, and a chart of accounts that maps to how the business is run. It is scoped to the decision-critical accounts first, because the goal of the reset is a function that runs, not an archive that is perfect.

Stabilization runs alongside. By day 30 the reporting is rebuilt: a management package template, a KPI set, a forecast model, and a close checklist with owners. By day 45 the first controlled close has happened, late by a few days while the reconciliations catch up. By day 60 the second close has landed on the calendar date, the weekly cash meeting has run eight times, and the monthly operating review has met twice. The function now has a pulse that does not depend on the consultant's calendar.

A finance department that runs only when the consultant is in the building is not a department. It is a very expensive visitor.

People. The reset treats the existing team as an asset until proven otherwise. Most bookkeepers and staff accountants in a broken function have been working without a reviewer, a calendar, or answers, and they improve quickly when they get all three. Roles are written. Gaps are named. When a hire is needed, we define the job, run the search with you, and onboard the person onto the documented process rather than into the old confusion.

Systems. We work in what you have unless it is the problem. A half-finished migration gets finished or reversed. Integrations between the operating system, the payroll provider, and the ledger get fixed so the same number is not typed three times. The bank feeds work. The reporting comes out of the system rather than out of a spreadsheet that one person maintains. If the system genuinely has to change, that becomes its own scoped project after the reset, not a surprise inside it.

Process and controls. The close calendar, the cash meeting, the operating review, the forecast cycle, and the year-end handoff to the CPA are installed as recurring events with owners. Controls are sized to the company: two people on every disbursement, vendor changes approved by someone who did not request them, payroll reviewed by someone who did not run it, bank access reviewed when people leave. Each one written on a page, and each one checked.

• People: roles defined, gaps named, hires made onto a documented process
• Systems: migrations finished, integrations fixed, reporting produced from the ledger
• Process: close calendar, weekly cash, monthly review, quarterly reforecast
• Controls: disbursement, vendor, payroll, and access controls that fit a company your size

Documentation runs through the whole engagement, but the last 30 days are where it becomes the product. Every recurring task gets a procedure: what, when, who, how, and what to check. The close checklist, the reconciliation templates, the forecast model, the package templates, the KPI definitions, and the control descriptions are assembled into a finance operating manual that lives in your environment and reads as if it was written for the next person, because it was.

Transition depends on where you are going. If your team will run the function, the last 30 days are a supervised handoff: they run the close, we review. They run the cash meeting, we sit in. If a hire is coming, we help recruit and onboard them onto the manual. If the answer is a fractional controller or CFO, the reset steps down into that engagement without a gap. If the company is heading into a sale, a refinancing, or a growth plan, the final phase strengthens the decisions those events require: pricing, capital plan, and lender package.

Days 60 to 90 also test the function against stress. A close with the lead person on vacation. A lender request answered from the package instead of from scratch. A forecast variance explained by the model's owner. If it holds, the reset is done.

Done is specific. The close lands by the tenth business day for two consecutive months, with a reconciled balance sheet and a package that goes to the owner, the bank, and the CPA in one form. The 13-week forecast has been updated 12 times and its variance log shows it getting better. The KPI set is reported monthly and someone other than us can explain each number. Every recurring task has an owner, a backup, and a written procedure. The controls have been tested at least once. The people doing the work know what good looks like.

It is also honest about what is not done. The closing memo names the items left for the next phase: the system change that was deferred, the immaterial accounts that were noted rather than reconciled, the hire still in process. A reset that claims to have fixed everything in 90 days has fixed the summary, not the function.

The engagement is priced as a defined 90-day scope after the assessment, with the phases dated and the deliverables named. Extensions are scoped as their own thing. What we do not do is let a reset drift into an open-ended retainer, because the point of the engagement is that it ends.