Verado runs a marketplace for industrial surplus across southern Europe. Twenty-three hundred people, thirty-one in finance, and four entities acquired over three years that had never been properly brought together.
The situation
Each acquisition had arrived with its own ledger and been left on it, on the reasonable grounds that migrating a live business mid-year is how you lose a year of history. Three years of that reasonable decision had produced four ledgers, three expense tools and an intercompany spreadsheet nobody was willing to be the sole owner of.
- Four ledgers with four different period-end dates.
- Three expense tools, one of which was no longer sold by its vendor.
- An intercompany spreadsheet reconciled quarterly, by hand, taking about nine days.
The audit was the sharp edge. A sample request meant pulling from four systems, reconciling them, and explaining the differences — six weeks of turnaround on a question the auditors expected to take days, repeated every time the sample changed.
The change
Verado did the thing everyone had said was too risky: it consolidated while the audit was open. The argument that won was that the audit was the reason, not the obstacle — the auditors were already asking for the exact mapping the consolidation needed, so the work was happening anyway.
Eleven weeks, one entity at a time, smallest first. Historical balances stayed where they were and were brought over as opening positions rather than re-keyed, which is what kept the audit trail intact.
We were told to wait until after the audit. Doing it during the audit is the only reason it was finished in eleven weeks.
Priya Raghavan · Group CFO, Verado
The outcome
There is one ledger. The intercompany spreadsheet is gone, and with it the nine days a quarter that went into reconciling it.
The audit finished ahead of schedule, which nobody had planned for. Sample turnaround went from six weeks to nine days, and every line in the sample arrived with its supporting document already attached — because the document was attached at the point of payment rather than retrieved afterwards.
