From 10-Month-Old Financials to Yesterday's Results

Metals Distributor

Team: ~20
Systems: Pentagon ERP | Power BI

How We Turned Years of Accounting Problems Into Daily Financial Visibility

An aerospace metals distributor had a problem that many growing businesses eventually face:

The business had grown faster than its financial systems and accounting processes.

The books weren't being reconciled monthly. Financial reporting was significantly behind, and the annual close could take as long as 10 months after year-end — essentially just in time to prepare the tax return.

Management was running the business without reliable, timely financial information.

The Problem

Without regular balance-sheet reconciliations and a disciplined monthly close, problems accumulated over time.

That created a much bigger issue than late financial statements:

The owners couldn't confidently see what was happening in the business while it was happening.

Sales were occurring today.

Margins were changing today.

Customers and salespeople were performing differently today.

But the financial information needed to understand those results wasn't available until much later.

What We Built

We started underneath the reports.

Before building prettier dashboards, we needed financial information we could trust.

We reconstructed historical accounting records, dug through approximately 10 years of financial data, recreated and validated balance-sheet reconciliations, corrected accounting issues and established repeatable reconciliation and close procedures.

Then we connected the company's financial and operational data to Power BI and built reporting that management could actually use to run the business.

Instead of simply seeing total sales at the end of a reporting period, management could analyze:

Sales → Gross Margin → Operating Profitability

across the dimensions that mattered to the business:

Customer | Salesperson | Geographic Region | Customer Type | Time Period

We also incorporated calculations such as sales commissions and estimated taxes to provide a more complete picture of expected profitability.

The Result

The company went from financial information that could be months behind to management reporting that provides:

• Prior-day sales and gross-margin results

• Customer profitability analysis

• Salesperson performance and commission calculations

• Performance by geographic region and customer type

• Operating-profit visibility

• Cash and financial-performance reporting

• Repeatable reconciliations and stronger underlying accounting

• Executive dashboards connected directly to the company's financial data

The goal wasn't simply to close the books faster.

It was to make the accounting useful while there was still time to make a decision.

Yesterday's Results. Before Today's Coffee.

Business owners shouldn't have to wait until year-end — or tax time — to understand what happened months ago.

Yesterday's business results can be on the screen before the owner's coffee brews.

But real-time reporting is only valuable when the numbers underneath it are right.

Clean the books. Connect the data. Put the information where the owner can use it.