Five Analyses You Can Run From Your Own Ledger

Each takes under an hour and each usually finds something.

1. Revenue by customer, less the cost of serving them

Export revenue by customer for twelve months. Allocate the direct costs of serving each.

What it reveals: a customer you are proud of who costs more than they pay. Almost every business has one, and almost nobody has calculated it.

Also calculate concentration. Your largest customer as a percentage of revenue. Above about 30% you have a dependency rather than a customer.

2. Margin by service line

Same exercise by what you sell.

What it reveals: one line subsidising another. Businesses often scale the line that was easiest to sell rather than the one that makes money.

3. Payment behaviour by customer

For each customer, the average days between invoice date and payment date over the last year.

What it reveals: which customers actually pay on time, as opposed to which have agreed terms. These are different lists.

It also lets you build a cash forecast on real behaviour instead of due dates, which is the difference between a forecast that works and one that does not.

4. Every recurring payment, largest first

Export twelve months of payments. Group by payee. Sort by total.

What it reveals: subscriptions nobody cancelled, services at rates agreed years ago, and duplicates. This is the analysis that most often pays for itself the same day.

5. The four control checks

Run these over the full payment population.

Payments clustering just below an approval threshold.
Duplicate payments, same payee and amount, close dates.
Supplier bank details matching an employee's.
Journals posted outside working hours or by people whose role should not allow it.

What it reveals: usually nothing, which is worth knowing. Occasionally something important.

Why these five

Each answers a question that changes a decision.

Which customers to keep. What to price differently. Whose payments to forecast optimistically. What to cancel. Where you are exposed.

Analysis that does not attach to a decision is reporting.

What you need to make them work

A clean export. Which means reconciled banks and a chart of accounts that separates things you want to see separately.

If your revenue is all coded to one account, analysis 1 and 2 are impossible until that is fixed. That is a bookkeeping job, and it is the prerequisite for everything here.

The one to run first

Number 4. Recurring payments, largest first.

It takes twenty minutes, needs no allocation judgment, and it is the one most likely to produce a saving today.

Where we fit

We run all five as part of management reporting, and the four control checks as part of audit fieldwork. If your ledger will not export cleanly, that is where to start.