Unifying Finance and IT Across a Five-Entity Private Equity Roll-Up and Reducing AR, AP, and Reporting Time by 34%
The decline in errors and escalations reflects work performed against defined processes instead of five sets of inherited habits.
34%
Faster AR, AP, and Reporting
42%
Lower Cost to Operate
28%
Fewer Errors
– Industry: Private Equity
– Scale: Five recently acquired operating entities, $49M combined revenue
– Engagement Timeline: 5 weeks to strategy and roadmap, 3 weeks to operating process design, 7 weeks to automation rollout, managed operation ongoing
– Practice Area(s): Accounting and Finance, IT and Cybersecurity
The Catalyst
A Platform Built by Acquisition
The sponsor’s thesis for its Construction platform depended on integrating what it bought. The newest acquisition brought the platform to five recently acquired entities and created the opening to consolidate the operating model across the whole roll-up rather than absorb one more business into an inconsistent whole.
Five Entities, Five Ways of Working
Each entity arrived with its own close process, its own AR and AP handling, its own administrative routines, and its own tooling. Nothing was comparable across the platform. Reporting had to be reconciled by hand, and no owner could see where work actually sat at any point in a cycle.
Where the Internal Playbook Stopped
The sponsor standardizes portfolio company operations internally as a matter of practice. These five businesses carried enough operational nuance that the internal playbook would have either flattened differences that mattered or stalled against them, leaving the platform integrated on paper only.
The Engineered Solution
Mapping Before Building
Strategy and Advisory opened the engagement with analysis rather than deployment. The team documented how finance, IT, and business administration actually ran inside each of the five entities, then built a roadmap for standardizing all three. That work produced a consolidation strategy that was formulated with, and agreed to by, the sponsor before a single process was rebuilt. The sequence mattered: the platform is a Post-Merger Integration problem, and integration decisions made before the current state is understood are the ones that get reversed later.
One Stack, Five Operating Realities
With the workflows mapped and the target state agreed, Operations and Process Engineering built the processes. Each entity received an operating process engineered to its own transaction mix, approval structure, and customer commitments, and every one of those processes ran on the technology stack already standard across the sponsor’s portfolio.
Standardization landed at the layer where it creates comparability, which is data, tooling, and controls, rather than at the layer where forced uniformity breaks a working business. Entities moved onto the new processes in sequence, so no entity carried a rebuild and a close at the same time.
Automation With Judgment in the Loop
Technology and AI then identified AR, AP, and financial reporting as the first processes ready for automation, on the reasoning that they were now defined identically enough across the platform to automate once and deploy five times. Automation was scoped to the deterministic paths: matching, routing, and scheduled reporting.
Exceptions, judgment calls, and anything touching a customer relationship stayed with named reviewers. What remained manual after the rollout moved to a Managed Services team operating as an engineered extension of the platform’s Accounting and Finance function, working the processes the engagement had just defined rather than inheriting five legacy ways of working.
Business Impact
Metric Category | Before Transformation | Post-Implementation Impact |
Processing Velocity | Entity-specific AR, AP, and reporting cycles, no common baseline | 34% reduction in processing time for the three automated processes |
Cost to Operate | Cost carried separately by each entity on legacy workflows | 42% reduction for the retained AR, AP, and reporting work |
Error Rate | Quality set independently by five separate process baselines | 28% reduction in errors |
Exception Management | Escalations handled ad hoc within each entity | 19% reduction in escalation events |
The platform now closes on one process, one stack, and one set of controls, which makes the five entities comparable to each other for the first time and makes the sixth acquisition an onboarding exercise rather than a fresh integration project.
Capacity that had been consumed by manual matching and reconciliation moved to analysis the sponsor can act on. The decline in errors and escalations reflects work performed against defined processes instead of five sets of inherited habits.
Partner Perspective
“While the firm typically standardizes portco operations internally, the businesses in our latest rollup were nuanced enough that we decided to engage a firm to augment our team and build a unified operating model. The decision to engage Cordatus paid off. The process mapping was incredibly detailed and the automations they built created real value for the business moving forward.”
The Next Step
Sponsors running a roll-up face the same decision at every add-on: integrate the business into the platform as it stands, or use the acquisition to reset the operating model across everything already owned.
The second option is available for longer than most platforms assume, and it is what makes the next acquisition cheaper to absorb than the last one.