A mid-market professional services firm was three months into selecting a new practice management platform. Independent review found the root cause, stopped the wrong purchase, and saved £1.5m.
A mid-market professional services firm was three months into selecting a new practice management and billing platform. The incumbent system was twelve years old and generating recurring reconciliation failures that consumed two days of finance team time each month to correct manually.
The internal project team had evaluated four vendors and were preparing a board recommendation to proceed with the largest - an enterprise-grade platform used primarily by firms ten times their size, quoted at £1.8m over 18 months. The CFO had concerns but lacked a structured basis for challenging the recommendation before the board commitment was made.
A 14-day Business Review examined the current system landscape, the reconciliation failure pattern, the vendor evaluation process, and the assumptions underpinning the board recommendation.
The root cause of the reconciliation failures was a data integrity issue in the time-recording module - fixable within the existing system in six to eight weeks at approximately £15k, and entirely unrelated to the platform. The vendor evaluation had assessed only three of four shortlisted platforms against a generic feature checklist rather than the firm's specific billing workflow. Two of the remaining platforms would have met requirements at £280k to £420k over three years.
The board recommendation was placed on hold. A structured six-week vendor re-evaluation was conducted and the board was presented with a comparison rather than a single recommendation. The root cause fix was scoped and delivered within the existing system in parallel.
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