The period closes without costing you a week.
A running bridge from work won, to money invoiced, to money collected, to margin. Built from the same live records that ran the work, rather than from a spreadsheet one person maintains and everybody quietly distrusts. Your accounting system stays exactly where it is.
- Bring both sides of the ledger together
- Match receipts against open invoices
- Flag anything that moved more than two percent
- Draft the variance note for the owner
Your two numbers disagree for one structural reason.
Every finance leader has lived this and most have stopped expecting it to be fixable, because the fix has always been sold as more discipline from the commercial team. It is not a discipline problem.
The break is always at signature
The agreement lives in the commercial system. The invoice lives in the accounting package. A person moves one into the other, and that person is the reason your pipeline number and your revenue number have never agreed. It is not a discipline failure. It is a design failure that every stack has.
So the close becomes archaeology
Half of the work is not accounting, it is reconstruction: finding out what was actually agreed, what was actually delivered, and why the number moved. That is why the close takes a week and why the explanation always arrives after the decision it should have informed.
You do not want a faster spreadsheet. You want the explanation to arrive before the decision instead of after it.
A close that ends on day nine tells you what already happened. A close that ends on day two lets you do something about it. The difference is not effort, it is whether the operating detail and the financial detail live in the same record.
From agreement to margin, on one continuous record.
Recurring and one-time revenue together
Subscriptions, retainers and one-off work in the same view, so the question of what is dependable and what is not has an answer rather than an estimate.
Invoices raised from signed agreements
The agreement carries the terms. The invoice is produced from them. Nobody re-enters an amount into a second system, which is where the two numbers used to start drifting.
Receipts matched on arrival
Payments reconcile against open invoices as they land, with the exceptions surfaced rather than buried, so the aged list is current instead of monthly.
Cost and margin by customer and job
What the work consumed, against what it earned. Profitability by customer, by product line and by team, calculated from the same records that ran the work.
Commissions calculated on the event
When payment clears, not when somebody rebuilds the spreadsheet. Terms live on the relationship, workings are shown, and nothing pays without approval.
Revenue and margin by channel
Spend and billing tracked per channel, so you can see what each customer earned and what it cost to earn there. The question of which channel is actually carrying an account stops being an opinion held by whoever built the last report.
Wholesale and retail pricing per product
Set the cost you pay and the price you charge for each product, per customer or per partner where the terms differ. The spread calculates itself on every transaction rather than being reconstructed at period end.
Referral network on the same ledger
Who introduced the customer, what they are owed, and what is left after they are paid. Referral terms live on the relationship, so attribution and margin resolve together instead of in two separate arguments.
Period comparisons with the reason attached
The movement and the explanation in the same place. The number that changed, the records behind it, and a written note you can put in front of a board.
One handover from commercial, then seven steps that run themselves.
The only manual crossing is the agreement itself. After that the sequence is mechanical, which is precisely why it should not be occupying a qualified finance team for a week every period.
Illustrative sequence. Approval thresholds, terms and reporting periods are configured to your own controls.
They do the reconstruction. You keep the judgement.
Explaining a variance and calculating commission are both mechanical once the underlying records are complete. Neither is a good use of a qualified person's week, and both are done badly when the week runs short.
Your revenue number and your operating number come from the same record, so they are structurally incapable of disagreeing.
- Trace the change back to the records that caused it
- Separate volume from price from mix
- Write the explanation in plain language
- Attach the supporting detail underneath it
- Apply the terms attached to that relationship
- Calculate what is owed and to whom
- Draft the statement with the workings shown
- Queue it for approval before anything is paid
Revenue is an opinion. Cash is the fact.
A business rarely fails because the revenue number was wrong. It fails because the money arrived later than the money went out. Receivables are the lever most companies have and least manage, because the position is only ever as current as the last export somebody remembered to run.
A cash position built from live records
What is invoiced, what is due this week, what is late and what has not been billed yet, drawn from the same records that ran the work rather than from a snapshot somebody exported on Monday.
A forecast that updates itself
Expected receipts by week, weighted by how each customer has actually paid you in the past rather than by the terms printed on the agreement. The customer who always takes an extra three weeks is modelled as the customer who always takes an extra three weeks.
Ageing that is current, not monthly
The aged list rebuilds as receipts land, so the thirty, sixty and ninety day buckets mean something on a Tuesday afternoon. Chasing decisions get made on today's position instead of on a report that closed a fortnight ago.
Working capital tied to delivery
Because the job and the invoice share a record, you can see cash committed to work in progress against cash already collected. That is the number that tells you whether growth is about to cost you money.
Exceptions surfaced, not buried
Short payments, unapplied receipts, disputed lines and credits held against an account are raised as they appear. These are the items that quietly distort a receivables number, and they are much cheaper to resolve in the week they occur.
Escalation on your thresholds
You set the days, the amounts and the point at which a person takes over. The agent follows up until then, and hands to a named owner rather than to a queue when the threshold is reached.
Billing chases what is owed. Finance decides what the position means, whether it funds the next month, and which customers are quietly financing themselves on your balance sheet. Same record, two different questions.
Nobody is asking for a better ageing report. They are asking whether the money lands before payroll does.
That question needs the operating detail and the payment history in the same place. Held apart, the answer takes a day to assemble and is stale by the time it is delivered, which is why the honest answer in most companies is still an educated guess.
The bridge, built while the month happened.
This is the screen the close argument comes down to. Signed value, recurring revenue, what has been invoiced, what is still outstanding and what it cost, in one place, assembled continuously rather than reconstructed on the ninth.
One period, one screen, no reconstruction
Screens are from a demonstration workspace. Records, names and figures are illustrative and are not a customer result.
Four things worth being precise about.
Finance buyers get oversold more than anyone, so here is the boundary drawn clearly rather than left comfortable and vague.
Kastor does not replace your accounting system
It should not, and we would be suspicious of anyone claiming otherwise. Your ledger, your chart of accounts and your statutory reporting stay where they are. Kastor connects to them.
It removes the retyping between them
The agreement produces the invoice. The receipt matches itself. The exception is raised rather than discovered. That is the whole claim, and it is the one that shortens your close.
It adds the operating context accounting cannot see
What the job cost, who delivered it, which partner is owed on it, and whether the customer is at renewal. Your ledger does not hold those. Kastor does, on the same record.
You keep the controls
Agents propose, people approve. Nothing pays, nothing posts and nothing goes out to a customer past a threshold you set without a named person releasing it, and every action is written to an audit trail.
A shorter close and a defensible number.
Finance is downstream of everything.
Bring last period's close to the call.
The bridge you built, the variance you had to explain, and how long the explanation took to assemble. We will walk it through the same sequence and show you which parts stop being work.