The situation
A compounding pharmacy that makes medicines to order for doctors and clinics. The product was strong and the customers loyal, but there was no finance team behind them. The founder was handling critical finance tasks personally, between running the business.
The brief was never bookkeeping. It was a finance function that would stand up to a sale process within four to five years: clean books, defensible reporting, a predictable close and the documentation a buyer asks for.
What we found
- No finance team, and no segregation of duties: the same person raised, approved and paid.
- Visibility stopped at the bank balance. There was no weekly view of runway, upcoming obligations or when customers would pay.
- The system ran the operation, but its finance workflows, controls and audit evidence were unclear.
- Payments to doctors, a sensitive area in healthcare, had no compliance framework behind them.
What we did
Set up the finance side of their system, a new bank, company expense cards and payroll through WPS, with approvals and segregation of duties from day one.
A monthly close and an Executive Pack every month, plus quarterly packs. A compliance framework for payments to doctors: speaker and advisory fees, conference travel, consultancy retainers and hospitality, each with the evidence an auditor will ask for. Consultancy income restructured into the right periods.
A break-even and cash runway model the leadership runs themselves, built ahead of a manufacturing launch.
The founder asked a simple question: what level of sales breaks the business even? Answering it honestly wasn't simple. One flow of money came in and went straight back out every month. It looked like revenue, but it had no effect on profit, and leaving it in made the model wrong in both directions. We took it out of both sides and said so openly.
Margin could only be measured where the system carried a product cost, so we flagged it as an estimate rather than present it as fact. The result is a model where every number is a formula or an input. The founder moves an assumption and watches the answer move, without asking us to rerun it.
Before and after
| Before | Now |
|---|---|
| The founder doing finance personally | A finance team running the close |
| The bank balance as the only number | Monthly and quarterly packs |
| No controls on who pays what | Approvals and segregation of duties |
| Doctor payments without evidence | A compliance framework an auditor can test |
| “What do we need to sell?” unanswered | A break-even target for every new contract |
What runs every month
The monthly close and Executive Pack, quarterly packs, WPS payroll reconciled to the right month, a weekly finance stand-up, and live numbers on FinPulse.
