Kestrel is a brand agency of a hundred and twenty people in Dublin. It has no finance department. It has Aoife, who is there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and an external accountant who sees the year once.
The situation
A small company’s close is not smaller. It is the same set of tasks with nobody to divide them between, which means the constraint is not effort but calendar — two days a week, and month-end needs four of them in a row.
- A bookkeeping add-on that could import a bank feed but not a card statement.
- A card portal belonging to the bank, with no way to attach anything to a line.
- A receipts folder in shared storage, organised by whoever last remembered to.
The practical effect was that January closed in February and February closed in March, permanently one month behind. Kestrel is profitable and always has been, so nothing broke — but every decision about hiring or pitching was made against numbers that were five weeks old.
The change
There was no migration project because there was nobody to run one. Kestrel switched cards over on a Tuesday, moved supplier payments the following Tuesday, and ran the third Tuesday as a normal week.
The only real preparation was deciding the approval rules in advance: what one person can approve alone, what needs a second name, and what stops entirely. For a company this size that conversation took an hour and has not needed revisiting.
I am two days a week. Anything that needs me to remember something on a Monday was never going to work, and this does not.
Tobias Lang · Managing Director, Kestrel
