Cases
Situations I have taken over.
No reference list, no client logos. Real situations from recent months – anonymised, but real. From small owner-managed businesses to group sites. Size doesn’t decide. The situation does.
Taking responsibility
When suddenly nobody is in charge.
The finance manager was gone. The month-end close still had to happen.
At one site, the finance manager in charge dropped out at short notice. I didn’t know the site beforehand – and was on the first results call on my second working day. Month-end close, reporting and leading the team were all due at the same time.
I took over responsibility, coordinated the closing and led the team until a successor had been found and onboarded.
No closing was delayed, no deadline missed. The site kept running as if the absence had never happened.
Several months as acting head of accounting.
After the person in charge left, the head of accounting position at one company remained vacant. Several employees needed leadership – and the closings had to go on.
I took over as acting head, was responsible for the closings for several months and led the annual audit.
The closings continued without interruption. And the new head took over a well-ordered department, not a building site.
Bookkeeping without a system – until it got one.
For years, a company had kept its bookkeeping without a clear system. The same transactions were booked one way one time and another way the next. A lot was left lying, closings were delayed, reliable numbers didn’t exist.
I took over the ongoing bookkeeping, worked through the previous year in parallel and brought structure into it – with fixed booking logic that treats the same cases the same way. I also gave management a report that makes developments visible month by month.
The closing now runs to a clear rhythm. Management has monthly figures it can trust – and booking logic that holds even without me.
Stabilising finance
When the numbers can no longer be explained.
Results were swinging. Nobody knew why.
At one business, monthly results swung by six-figure amounts with no traceable cause. Accruals were booked on gut feeling, and the valuation method had grown over years and was barely understood any more.
I analysed the valuation, rebuilt it, switched from standard to actual costs and recalculated four months retroactively to create a reliable basis for comparison.
Since then, results are traceable. Not every month turns out better – but every month can be explained.
A long series of financial statements, corrected retroactively.
At a service company, a profit and loss transfer agreement had not been booked correctly for many years. A loss carried forward should have been offset first, and there were period shifts on top. The data was patchy, the documentation thin.
I prepared the figures in a structured way and retroactively corrected a series of consecutive annual financial statements – balance sheets, income statements, notes and all appendices. The prepared statements were submitted to the tax advisor for review.
Years nobody wanted to touch any more were clean and audit-ready in the end.
The same error came back every month.
A small owner-managed trading company had introduced new invoicing software that passed receivables postings to financial accounting incorrectly. It was spotted late – the annual statements were already done and the following year was under way.
I worked through both financial years systematically and prepared the corrected figures so that the statements and tax returns could be redone, and put the current year on a clean footing. For the future, I developed a small program that automatically converts the raw invoicing data into the correct posting format.
Statements and tax returns were right again – and the error cannot happen again.
Delivering under pressure
When the deadline is fixed and nothing is ready.
The tax audit was already under way.
During an ongoing tax audit, it turned out that the required data extract could not be provided from the ERP system – a central IT ticket that couldn’t be solved at short notice. Several sites had the same problem.
I evaluated an alternative solution, integrated it and put it into production.
The audit started as planned on the rescheduled date – and the solution carried the other sites as well.
Four days to the annual financial statements.
For two affiliated companies, a possible restructuring suddenly came up. The required annual financial statements didn’t exist – and the paperwork was thin: no account reconciliations, no prior-year data, only the bare statements.
After weeks of requesting the missing documents, I prepared both sets of statements in full – balance sheet, income statement and notes. The prepared statements were then submitted to the person responsible for review.
The statements were ready before the deadline became a problem. The restructuring could be assessed as planned.
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