Accounting case studies
Accounting case studies: what our team changed
Six engagements by the Opteamus accounting team, led by a Director of Accounting and Finance with chartered accountant (CA) level expertise. Bookkeeping cleanups, payables and receivables, month-end close, acquisition due diligence and quarterly audits, in QuickBooks Online, Xero, Bill.com and Buildium. Clients are named only where they gave permission.
15 to 20 days → 5
month-end close at Lenhoff Properties
50%+
of transactions categorized automatically after our rules
15%+
gap found in a seller's earnings, against a 5% tolerance
Monthly → daily
invoicing for a US medical supplies company
Medical supplies company, US, multiple locations
Bills paid on schedule and invoicing moved from monthly to daily
Client anonymised. The business was selling well and the finance side had stopped keeping up. Bank statements were not being loaded into QuickBooks Online, so balances and reports were wrong. Bill.com was updated about every two weeks because the internal staff were busy running operations. Vendors were charging interest and late fees, customer invoices went out once a month, and management could not see their real cash position on any given day.
What we did
- Loaded every missing bank statement into QuickBooks Online, fixed the bank feeds, reconciled the backlog and moved to a weekly reconciliation.
- Took over Bill.com and updated it daily instead of every two weeks, with an approval workflow and a weekly payment run.
- Standardized invoicing, moved it from a monthly batch to daily, put receivables on a weekly cycle and set follow-ups for overdue customers.
- Built a rolling 52-week cash flow model tied to payables and receivables, with a dashboard management can read without asking.
- Set a fixed month-end close with statements delivered on a schedule and a variance review.
Results
- Zero overdue vendor balances within six weeks.
- Vendor interest and late fees stopped. In dollars they were a few hundred; the bigger change was a payables routine that now runs on its own.
- Days to invoice went from monthly to daily, so collections came in sooner.
- Cash position visible daily instead of reconstructed weeks later.
- The company kept growing without hiring a full-time finance person.
Who this is for: Owners whose books are behind because the people who should keep them are busy running the business.
Medical products company, US
Months of unreconciled books rebuilt and a chart of accounts that makes sense
Client anonymised. A healthy business with books that could not be trusted. Bank accounts had not been reconciled for months. The chart of accounts had duplicate and unclear categories, with operating and non-operating items mixed together, and expenses were posted to asset accounts. The company was also paying more than it needed to for vendor financing.
What we did
- Rebuilt the reconciliation history from scratch and cleared every unmatched entry.
- Redesigned the chart of accounts: a clean split of revenue, cost of goods and operating expenses, duplicates removed, grouping that matches how a medical products business runs.
- Reviewed how vendors were being paid, found cheaper terms and lending options, and moved the company onto them.
- Reclassified the historical transactions that were wrong and wrote posting rules so they stay right.
- Set up monthly statements, a reporting calendar and dashboards for cash, payables, receivables and expenses.
Results
- Every account reconciled with no unexplained variances.
- Monthly vendor outflows reduced through cheaper payment and financing terms.
- Financial statements consistent month to month and usable for budgeting, forecasting and audit.
Who this is for: Owners who suspect their numbers are wrong but cannot say where.
J&M Family Initiative, acquisition due diligence
A 15%+ gap in the seller's earnings found before the purchase
Client named with permission. The client was evaluating the purchase of another daycare business. The seller's information memorandum showed profits that looked optimistic, left out some regular expenses, and did not match the pattern in the bank statements. In a small service business inflated earnings are the usual risk, and the price depends on the margin.
What we did
- Pulled a full year of the target's bank transactions and categorized every one.
- Rebuilt revenue (tuition and fees) and the recurring cost base (payroll, rent, supplies, utilities, taxes, vendors) from the bank data alone, with no reliance on the seller's figures.
- Produced a bottom-up P&L from that data and set it beside the prior year's P&L and the seller's projections.
- Assessed margins, cost ratios, cash burn and anomalies.
Results
- The gap between the seller's stated earnings and the earnings rebuilt from the bank data was more than 15%, against a tolerable limit of 5%.
- The buyer negotiated from evidence instead of the seller's figures.
- The client bought the business for well below the asking price.
Who this is for: Owners buying a small business who want someone on their side of the table to test the seller's numbers.
J&M Family Initiative, quarterly variance audits
Late tuition payments caught and a payroll saving from one schedule change
Client named with permission. Several service units, each with its own budget and seasonality. Leadership planned staffing, purchasing and expansion on projected income and gross margin, and wanted every quarter's results explained. Projections were built differently in each unit, actuals were clean but never analysed, and margin losses were not tracked separately.
What we did
- One projection template for every department, comparable quarter to quarter.
- A quarterly audit of projected against actual income and gross margin.
- A breakdown of every margin shift into its cause: vendor price changes, staff error, utilisation, unplanned discounts.
- A written quarterly commentary: what happened, why, what to change and what to watch next quarter, with specific recommendations.
Results
- The projections themselves proved mostly accurate; the audit showed leadership where to trust them.
- The audit found what the monitoring had missed: several families were paying tuition after the due date.
- On Opteamus's recommendation J&M adjusted the teacher schedule slightly, which saved a significant amount in payroll.
- Every variance explained each quarter, early enough to act mid-quarter.
Who this is for: Owners of multi-location or multi-service businesses who get a P&L every month and still cannot tell which part of the business is leaking.
J&M Properties, quarterly property audits on Buildium
Duplicate cleaning costs found across three properties
Client named with permission. Residential, commercial and mixed-use properties, all run through Buildium. Buildium handled collections, charges and operating expenses, but the owners wanted to know, each quarter, how every property was performing and why income and costs moved. The data existed; the analysis did not.
What we did
- Measured each property's costs against a documented benchmark for property management costs: management fees, taxes, insurance, utilities, cleaning, trash, fire safety and the rest.
- Compared actual costs with the benchmark line by line, per property and for the portfolio.
- Explained each quarter's movement in income and expenses, flagged cost spikes and tracked whether target margins were met.
Results
- Across the three properties, the audit found duplicate cleaning costs; J&M Properties removed them once Opteamus raised the issue.
- Owners can see why a property's income or expenses changed and which properties underperform.
- Rent, maintenance budget and vendor decisions made on data, with fewer cash flow surprises.
Who this is for: Property owners and managers whose software tells them what happened but not why.
Lenhoff Properties, Buildium to Xero accounting and monthly reporting
Month-end close cut from 15 to 20 days to 5
Client named with permission. Operations ran on Buildium and the monthly financial statements had to come out of Xero. Buildium exports came through inconsistently, so Xero had gaps. Staff categorized transactions by hand, so month-end was always late, and the two systems did not reconcile. Property managers were losing time to accounting work, and landlords were getting late, inconsistent statements.
What we did
- Standardized the Buildium export and added automated checks for missing or duplicate transactions.
- Mapped Buildium categories to a clean Xero chart of accounts and wrote Xero rules to classify recurring items automatically, tagged by unit, building and property type.
- Set a monthly three-way reconciliation: Buildium ledger, bank statement, Xero.
- Produced a monthly package per property: income statement, expense breakdown, cash flow summary, month-over-month variance notes and supporting schedules for owners.
- Fixed the close date and added a review session each period.
Results
- Month-end cycle down from 15 to 20 days to 5 days.
- More than half of all transactions now categorise themselves under the rules we set.
- Buildium and Xero agree every month; statements are audit-ready and reach landlords on a predictable date.
- Property managers' time went back to tenants and leasing.
Who this is for: Property managers running Buildium (or AppFolio) alongside a general ledger and tired of the two never matching.
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