Finance & Management

The funding plan rests on a spreadsheet where three assumptions no longer have an author. It will clear the committee — until the first question about where a figure came from.

A financial plan is credible only when every assumption carries its source.

Defensible economics

A price is not a total: it is a model you can test

The scene starts from the single figure the buyer receives, then takes it apart into five levels — direct cost, site overheads, company overheads, contingency, and the margin at the very top, the thinnest of all. Markers say where each level comes from: the contract, the trade, or nowhere yet, and what is missing is written N.A., never zero. Then a single assumption moves: everything above rises, and the margin absorbs it alone. The cash curve ends below zero before the first payment lands — because it is not the price that puts a company at risk, it is the schedule. A mechanism and a movement — no amounts, no real data.

Finance & management

The price that comes apart

A single bar — the total the buyer receives — separates into five levels: direct cost, site overheads, company overheads, contingency, and the margin at the very top. Markers rise to say where each level comes from: the contract, the trade, or nowhere yet (N.A.). Move a single assumption: everything above rises, and the margin absorbs it alone. Then the cash curve dips below zero before the first payment lands.

A management team submitting a firm price without knowing which of its levels would hold if one assumption moved — and that has never seen its own cash dip below zero before the first payment.

Watch the total come apart, then the margin eaten from the top.

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What a price must be able to show

Margin, cash and risk in the same decision: a price is not a total, it is a model of assumptions that can be opened one by one.

ADVISORY · MODEL

See margin, cash and risk in the same decision.

Price is not a total: it is a model of testable assumptions.

A bid profitable on paper can become fragile through timing or uncertainty.

TARGET MARGIN · BREAK-EVEN · CASH REQUIREMENT · SENSITIVITY

Method

Direct / indirect cost decomposition, indexation, cash-in phasing and sensitivity scenarios.

Volume assumption and work unit
Fully loaded cost, overhead, contingency
Price revision / adjustment: which index, and for which family of works
Working capital and payment schedule — the REAL delay, not the statutory one
Base · downside · break scenario

Demonstration amounts are marked ILLUSTRATIVE. Real figures come from your own data.

What we open, and in what order

A financial file is not read in the order it arrives. Four openings, always the same ones, always in this order — and for each the mistake most often lodged there. This is the first week of an engagement, and it decides the worth of the ten that follow.

The records before the spreadsheets

The last three years of accounts, the aged debtor and creditor listings, the ledger of third-party accounts, the last quarter of bank statements. We read the records first; the client's spreadsheet is opened afterwards, to understand what it assumed.

A file almost always arrives as a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is a conclusion, never a record: it does not say where its numbers came from, it says what someone wanted them to say.

The order book, job by job, with its dates

What remains to be produced and what remains to be collected on each live job, the date of the next interim account, that of the last one accepted, and the payment delay actually observed with that particular buyer — not the one written in the contract.

An order book expressed as one single amount does not say when the money arrives. It is the date that is missing, almost never the amount.

The commitments that never show in the margin

Contract bonds and their release calendar, finance leases, rents, retentions not yet released, the shareholder current account and the agreement governing it. Each one is dated, and each one must have an exit date written down somewhere.

An advance-payment bond still live two years after handover costs money every month, and appears in no profit and loss account.

The cost structure, as it is actually carried

How many people produce, how many supervise, what one loaded productive hour costs, and what the overhead absorbs in the months when nothing ships. The allocation basis is written down before it is applied, never after.

An average hourly rate computed across the whole headcount dilutes supervision into production: it flatters the direct cost and hollows out the result, and nothing on screen signals it.

The four figures we rebuild ourselves

The method says how we proceed; this says what we recompute before anything is signed. Four quantities, and for each the mistake most often met.

The direct cost, line by line

What the works cost before anything is added: quantities taken back from the documents, purchase prices asked again, execution times rebuilt on the method actually chosen.

A purchase price from two years ago, copied across to next year's site: it does not show in the total, it is paid at the end.

What the overhead really costs

Supervision, site setup and clearance, shared plant, general overhead: each named, tied to what causes it, then spread on a basis that can be explained.

Overhead goes in as a round percentage — and a round percentage comes from nowhere.

The calendar of the money

Money in and money out placed at its date: advances, interim payments, retentions, actual payment terms, and the working capital that follows, week by week.

Margin gets watched and never the date the cash runs short: the two do not fall in the same month.

What breaks the model

The assumptions that tip the job, tested one by one to the point where the equation no longer holds — and the exact condition to watch so it can be seen coming.

An assumption that was never named cannot be tested: after three reviews, it passes for a fact.

An engagement, week by week

The durations and volumes below are orders of magnitude observed on a typical engagement, not a measurement of the firm: a heavier file stretches them, it does not change their order. Nothing is modelled before it is rebuilt, and no model is stressed while its assumptions still have no author.

Weeks one and two — rebuild

We go back to the records and rebuild the figures by hand before opening any model at all. On a typical engagement, some thirty cost lines taken back to source cover most of the account: those are the ones recalculated, not the other three hundred.

Whatever could not be obtained is written down and stays in the deliverable. A list of what is missing beats a total that pretends to be complete.

Weeks three and four — model

Every assumption receives an author, a date and a source. The model holds one single assumptions sheet, kept apart from the calculations, so one can be changed in front of you without reopening the rest.

An assumption without an author is an assumption without a defence: it survives three reviews, and by the fourth committee it has become a fact.

Week five — stress

We break the model before the market does: three trajectories on identical assumptions — the central case, the one where a major collection slips by a month, the one where the advance is never paid — and a cash horizon held at thirteen weeks, week by week.

Three trajectories are enough. Beyond that nobody compares any more, they contemplate — and the meeting ends without a decision.

Then — track

The plan is compared with reality on a fixed cycle, variance by variance. The dashboard holds five to seven indicators, each with a written definition, an owner, and the previous period's reading kept right beside it.

A single indicator cannot be wrong; two readings can. It is yesterday's measure, kept beside today's, that makes a drift visible.

Four situations we know how to work through

Situations from the trade, not client references: each states the method used, the deliverable handed over, and the difficulty that had to be cleared. Assignments actually carried out, names removed, are just below.

A group margin hiding loss-making jobs

We rebuild the fully loaded cost job by job from source records — booked hours, allocated purchases, subcontracting, share of overhead — then compare it with the price sold, line by line. Deliverable: a result per job, and the allocation rule written down and open to challenge.

What was hard: getting the allocation rule accepted. Until it is written and owned, every manager disputes the share attributed to them — and a correct figure nobody owns is of no use.

A funding plan that will not survive the first question

We reopen every assumption, give it back an author, a date and a source, test the sensitivities and isolate those that tip the deal. Deliverable: a model with named assumptions, a sensitivity note, and an explicit list of what is not known.

What was hard: three assumptions no longer had an author. Reopening them stretched the schedule; leaving them would have made the file indefensible at the first question about where a number came from.

A unit-price build-up that cannot be defended

Bare cost, site overheads, general overheads, on-cost rate: each component is rebuilt with its source. What is missing is not filled in — the build-up stays open, and the line carries a note of what prevents it from being closed.

What was hard: agreeing to hand over an incomplete build-up. A component closed on a guess holds until the first question, and that is always the one that gets asked.

An acquisition, and accounts that do not say everything

We read the accounts as practitioners: what should have been provided for and was not, the cut-off between periods, deferred income, the shareholder current account and the agreement behind it. Deliverable: an accounts review in two columns — what is established, what remains to be documented.

What was hard: the shareholder current account sat in the balance sheet with no written agreement. The amount was legible, when it fell due was legible nowhere — and it is the due date that sets the price.

Prices and indices read at source, told without the names

Over a thousand awarded prices collected, the revision index chosen by the nature of the works, the questions asked before pricing: what we produced, and what was hard. Names removed, volumes kept.

TRACK RECORD · REAL ASSIGNMENTS, NAMES WITHHELD

01
A finishing-trades contractor, around ten staff, northern France. No in-house estimating department.
When · Three consecutive years, between 2017 and 2021.
What we did
We ran its entire bid desk, exclusively: spotting the consultations, inventorying the documents, quantity take-off, unit-price build-up, technical submission, form of tender, filing. It had no estimating department — we were it.
What it produced
111 priced bills of quantities, 68 specifications and tender regulations analysed, 54 signed forms of tender, 48 execution programmes, 47 technical submissions, 27 drawing sets. Up to a hundred consultations handled in a single month.
What was hard
The pace. At a hundred files in a month, what breaks is never the pricing: it is the reading. We held it by industrialising the document inventory and the hunt for contradictions between documents — so that engineering time went to the line items carrying most of the money, and nowhere else.
02
Five competing contractors, one and the same package, one and the same tender file. Measured from our own archive.
When · Bids from the 2017-2021 period, measured in 2026.
What we did
We took the five bids submitted on the same works and traced back, for each one, not the price shown but the quantity it had measured before setting it.
What it produced
From 281 to 505 square metres measured for the same works, and from 9.73 to 25 euros per square metre: a one-to-four-point-six spread on a single line of the bill. The full comparison, quantity by quantity.
What was hard
Proving the gap came from the take-off, not the price. A bill of quantities does not say so: it shows an amount that looks firm. We had to rebuild each bidder's quantity to show that five serious contractors had simply not been pricing the same building.
03
Our in-house price reference, built for the contractors we advise. A multi-package public maintenance framework agreement.
When · 2018 contract, analysed in 2026.
What we did
We opened the schedules of rates actually accepted on a maintenance framework agreement — nine packages, nine successful contractors, from masonry to electrical works — then cross-checked them, family of works by family of works, against our own submitted prices.
What it produced
4,905 lines read, 1,406 awarded prices retained, fourteen comparable families of works, and a table that answers one question only: where are we above the winning price, and by how much.
What was hard
The two sets do not carry the same level of proof, and that is written at the top of the document. Our lines self-verify at 42 % against their own total — quantity times unit rate equals the line amount. A schedule of rates never does: it carries no quantities. We also discarded four families out of fourteen whose gap was implausible, rather than publish a table that held together nicely.
04
A bidder for a structural works and waterproofing package, inside the restricted area of an international airport. Moroccan contract, firm non-revisable price.
When · 2026.
What we did
We ran the file end to end: seventeen documents read, take-off from the dimensioned drawings, a day-by-day seven-month execution programme, a technical submission in two volumes, a site layout for a landlocked footprint, a security-constraints note — then the written questions to the client, before pricing.
What it produced
Seventeen documents read and each tied to what it evidences; about 1,200 square metres of net floor area, four quadrants around a circular patio; close to 800 cubic metres of structural concrete and 120 tonnes of steel held by the bill; 1,340 square metres of waterproofing and 432 metres of upstands; nine questions asked before the first price.
What was hard
The file arrived as an eighteen-month, three-site, all-trades parent contract, inside which the real package had to be isolated: one site, seven months. Reading both contractual tiers avoided scheduling — and paying for — a site installation two and a half times too long. And a floating screed imposed by the acoustic report added fifty-six millimetres to every raw floor: it is written in no structural document.
05
Contractors bidding outside France: nationally funded contracts, contracts financed by a multilateral lender, private contracts under a standard engineering form.
When · Reference corpus assembled and kept open through 2026.
What we did
We assembled the corpus that lets you qualify a contract before reading it: which regime applies — the buying entity's, never the programme's label —, which edition of the standard form is referenced, where the particular conditions sit, and which protections they have removed.
What it produced
The general conditions of an international standard engineering contract — twenty clauses, 453 pages — in the version reproduced inside a multilateral lender's standard bidding document; the standard documents of four lenders; ten countries and two regional economic unions, every text opened and dated; the published fee scales of institutional arbitration, so a dispute cost is provided for instead of endured.
What was hard
The edition. An article quoted from the wrong vintage is a mistake, and the freely available vintage is not the most recent one: one lender stopped reproducing that text in July 2019. Every clause we quote comes from the document we opened, with its edition; what we have not opened is marked as unverified, never quietly filled in.
06
Contractors exposed to price adjustment, in France and Morocco.
When · Reference corpus maintained through 2026.
What we did
We sorted the price-adjustment indices by nature of works and by country, with what each one actually measures — so that a price is adjusted by the index matching its content, not by the one carrying the sector's name.
What it produced
Eighty-four French indices sorted and documented; the official Moroccan indices for building, civil engineering structures and road works; the adjustment formula and its components; and for each one, what it weighs — the all-trades building index is close to 59 % a labour index, so it under-adjusts a package heavy in materials.
What was hard
A building index applied to a civil engineering structure gives a wrong result, and the error can change direction depending on the period: we measured months where civil works rose two to three times faster than building, then fell harder afterwards. An index still marked provisional is flagged as such — it will be revised, and it will recompute everything built on it.
07
Organisations where several teams work the same subject, and our own assignments.
When · Practice installed and measured since 2026.
What we did
We keep three separate registers on every assignment: what is done and its evidence, what remains, and what is settled and will not be reopened. Each is updated the moment the thing happens — never at the end, because by then the people have gone and only the document remains.
What it produced
A register of closed decisions carrying, for each one, its reason, its date and the person who took it; an automated check that verifies every evening that no status document still says "to do" about something already done; and the measurement that triggered the method — the word "consolidation" appeared sixty-two times in our own work log before this list existed.
What was hard
A written rule protects nothing: it waits to be read, and nobody reads two hundred rules before acting. What holds is the check that runs by itself. That is what we install with a client — not one more method note.

No client name is published, with or without their consent. We publish no win rate: it is not measured, and an unmeasured figure is not a reference.

What we do

Business plans and financial models: explicit assumptions, tested sensitivities.
Financial structuring of an operation: structure, schedule, breaking points.
Management control: fully loaded costs, margin per job, budget variance.
Management dashboard: five to seven indicators, not thirty — each with a written definition, an owner, and the previous period's reading kept right beside it.
Cost analysis by job, by branch or by product line, with the allocation basis written down before it is applied — an allocation key that cannot be explained is disputed at the first committee.
Financial audit of a file before a decision, an acquisition or an equity entry.
Tax framing of operations, alongside your usual advisers.
Thirteen-week cash forecast and covenant headroom: the date of the next pressure point, not a curve.
Reading a set of accounts as a practitioner: what should have been provided for and was not, the cut-off between periods, deferred income, the shareholder current account and the agreement behind it.
Unit-price build-up: bare cost, site overheads, general overheads and the on-cost rate — every component carries its source, and a build-up with a missing component stays open rather than being closed on a guess.
Cost of a contract's bank undertakings — bid bond, performance bond, advance-payment bond, and the one that replaces retention on interim accounts — with their release calendar: lines still tied up two years after handover cost money every month.
Currency exposure and cross-border taxation: the share payable in foreign currency, repatriation risk, withholding tax, the permanent-establishment threshold and whether local tax is recoverable or not.

What we deliver

Business plan & costed financial model

Structuring note & funding plan

Thirteen-week cash forecast, on the payment terms actually observed with that buyer

Unit-price build-up per line item, with the on-cost rate applied and where it comes from

Sensitivity analysis & breaking points

Accounts review: what should have been provided for, and what remains to be documented

Management dashboard & margin tracking

Financial audit report

Multi-year budget trajectory, with the previous period's reading kept

The method

Rebuild

Start from the actual records, never from an inherited spreadsheet nobody owns. An assumption without an author is an assumption without a defence.

Model

Assumptions that are named, dated and open to challenge one by one — and every amount carries its year, because a 2019 euro is not a 2026 euro.

Stress

We break the model before the market does: sensitivities, breaking points, and the case where the money arrives late.

Track

The plan is compared with reality on a fixed cycle, variance by variance — and the previous reading is kept: a single value cannot be wrong, two can.

WHAT YOU WILL HAVE IN HAND · The Integrated Treasury Room

Move one collection assumption: the pressure point, action and missing evidence move with it.

Flows converge on a single cash point.

We connect cash, activity, commitments and decisions across a horizon you can actually steer. The executive sees more than a curve: the next pressure point, the assumption creating it and the action available before it arrives.

The central, adverse and favourable cases remain comparable because they share the same sources. An undocumented assumption is not silently included: it carries N.F. and remains outside the defensible total.

Open assumptions

Collections, payments, commitments and sensitivity

Integrated three-statement model: income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement reconciled within a single versioned scenario.

Driver-based model: volume, price, mix, workload, productivity, billing and collections drive every line of the model.

Direct 13-week cash flow forecast, with collections and payments positioned by date.

IAS 7-format cash flow statement: operating, investing and financing activities kept distinct.

Working capital and cash conversion cycle: receivables, inventory and payables; DSO, DIO and DPO calculated and reconciled.

Workload plan: backlog, capacity, utilisation rate, productive hours and subcontracting.

Contribution margin and full cost: variable costs, fully loaded direct costs, fixed overhead and absorption.

CAPEX, OPEX and depreciation tracked with their distinct impacts on the income statement, balance sheet and cash.

Rolling forecast: actuals, budget, current forecast and price-volume-mix variance breakdown.

Cash trough, runway, break-even and margin of safety: level, date and breach condition identified.

Debt schedule, DSCR and covenant headroom: formula taken from the facility agreement, maturities and threshold.

Alternative performance measures (APM/MPM): adjusted EBITDA, free cash flow or other management measures, defined, reconciled and applied consistently.

Sources drawn on

IAS 7IFRS 18

The model informs the decision; it replaces neither the client’s accounting framework, nor the contractual definition of covenants, nor a guarantee of outcome. A forecast remains a trajectory under assumptions.

THE QUESTIONS THAT SET THE PRICE

What we will ask you before we start.

Four questions we ask on every file in this domain. Each comes from an incident someone paid for — us, or a client before us.

Does the cash hold for thirteen weeks, and under which payment assumption?

A statutory payment term is not an actual one: according to the French payment-terms observatory report handed over on 10 July 2025, the average payment delay reached 13.6 days at the end of 2024, one day worse than the year before, and that persistence deprives SMEs and micro-businesses of 15 billion euros of cash. So we build the thirteen-week cash forecast on the terms actually observed with that buyer, advance and retention on interim accounts included, bonding lines tied up included — then we stress the margin against the bank covenant and we date the low point.

If nobody asks it — A project profitable on paper that runs out of cash in the fourth month, when there is nothing left to negotiate.

What is the price of currency risk, and who carries it?

The share payable in foreign currency and the share in local currency are set by the tender documents, not by the contractor. A non-convertible currency or exchange controls create a repatriation risk that is not hedged like a rate risk. We price the two separately, then we name the mechanism that covers them and what it costs, before setting the margin.

If nobody asks it — An eight percent margin wiped out by a ten percent devaluation.

What do the bank bonds cost, and when are they released?

Bid bond, performance bond, advance-payment bond, the bond that replaces the retention on interim accounts: each has its rate, its term and its release condition — and an on-demand bank undertaking is called without proof of default. We build them into overheads with their release calendar, and we check whether the tender requires a local bank: that is an issuing lead time to put on the submission schedule.

If nobody asks it — Bank lines still tied up two years after handover, on a site that no longer exists.

Are withholding tax and permanent establishment in the price?

A foreign contractor executing a site may suffer withholding tax and, beyond a threshold duration, full local taxation through a permanent establishment. The tax treaty between the two countries is read before the margin is priced, and local value added tax is checked: recoverable, or definitively borne by the contractor.

If nobody asks it — A non-recoverable tax discovered on the first invoice, on a price already submitted.

CAPABILITY SCENARIO — NOT A CLIENT REFERENCE

When we get the call

A growing company steers margin at group level and discovers loss-making jobs only afterwards. We rebuild the fully loaded cost per job from source records, then install a monthly variance review. Commercial trade-offs are now made before commitment, not at year-end.

Related disciplines

A file rarely draws on a single discipline.

Consulting & Management

Structured decision

Engineering & Construction

Executable project

All disciplines in this practice

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