Every engagement starts with a written audit, so it is fair to ask what that actually is. Below is a complete example — an invented 14-person residential services company, not a client. The structure, the method and the arithmetic are exactly what you receive.
12 hrs
a week, across five findings — measured during fieldwork, not estimated afterwards.
Example report, total of findings 01–05$18,720
a year, at a loaded rate of $30 an hour agreed at kickoff.
12 hrs × 52 weeks × $30$4,680
of that costs nothing to fix. Two of the five findings are settings changes.
Findings 03 and 05Each one carries what is happening, how the time was measured, the recommended fix, and the guardrail on that fix. Annual cost is measured hours × 52 × the loaded hourly rate agreed at kickoff. It counts staff time only.
01
Technicians close a job in the field app. Someone in the office reads each one and types it into the accounting package, because the two were never connected. Every invoice is entered twice, and the second entry is where the typos live.
02
A cancellation means four calls: the customer, the technician, the next job moved forward, and the supplier. Nobody is doing anything wrong. There is simply no place where a change to the day writes itself to everyone who needs it.
03
Statement matching exists in the accounting package already being paid for. It was switched off during setup and never switched back on. This one is a settings change and a fifteen-minute walkthrough, included in the audit. It costs nothing and I do not build anything.
04
Three exports, pasted into a spreadsheet, reformatted so it can be read. By the time it is readable it describes last month. The cost here is not only the hours — it is that nobody looks at the numbers between reports.
05
Photos go from a phone to email to a shared drive, by hand, twice. The field app already stores them against the job. This is a process change, owned by whoever runs dispatch, and it also costs nothing.
Every report names one or two things you might have expected on the list, and says why they are already fine. In the example above it is the CRM — it is untidy, but it is not costing hours, and reorganising it would bill you for tidiness. A report that finds a problem everywhere is a sales document, not an audit.
Findings are ordered by what they cost per year, not by what is interesting to fix. The one that wastes the most money is first, whether or not I can sell you anything to solve it.
Hours are timed during fieldwork wherever a process could be observed. Where a number is an estimate, the finding says so in the sentence, not in a footnote.
If the answer is a feature you already pay for and are not using, the report says so and tells you how to switch it on. Two of the five findings above are that.
Every recommended build carries the sign-off gate, spending ceiling or access limit that applies to it — agreed before anything is built, not added after something goes wrong.
The last page proposes the highest-return package — in the example, findings 01 and 02 closed together, because they touch the same two systems and cost less built at once than built separately. It carries a fixed fee, a duration and a scope. You are free to take the report and stop there; it is written to be useful either way.
A walk through the tools you already run, so the report is useful the day you get it. Nothing is quoted on the call and nothing is signed on it.
Justin.Moodie@kingsideconsulting.comPrefer to just pick a slot? Book directly on the calendar.