Untangling Financial Records Across Three Operating Entities
How Advip separated and reconstructed the financial records of a three-entity surveying group, then built the structure to keep them clean.
The Situation
The group operated through three separate entities, but their financial activities were never cleanly separated. Income earned by one entity arrived in the bank account of another. Supplier payments went out without recording which business had incurred the cost.
None of it was deliberate. It is what happens when three companies share directors, an office and a bookkeeper, and operational reality moves faster than the record-keeping.
By the time we were engaged, incomplete records, missing supporting documents and inconsistent bookkeeping meant nobody could say with confidence what any single entity had earned, what it owed, or what it was owed. Intercompany transactions had never been identified or reconciled. Bank accounts held transactions nobody could explain.
The consequence was serious. Management had no reliable view of how any one business was performing, and both the tax filings and the statutory financial statements rested on figures that could not be supported.
What we did
This was never going to be a bookkeeping assignment. The group needed its history untangled and a new structure built to stop the problem returning.
The first task was establishing what had actually happened. We worked back through bank statements, invoices, receipts and transaction schedules, determined which entity each transaction belonged to, and reconstructed the income and expense records that had gone missing.
The second task was making sure it did not recur. Separating the history solves the problem once. Separating the process solves it permanently.
Inside the work
Reconstructing the position meant matching customer receipts back to the correct invoicing entity, identifying payments one company had made on behalf of another, and separating ordinary trading transactions from loans, advances and intercompany transfers. From there we established the amounts due to and from each entity, reconciled bank, customer, supplier and intercompany balances, and prepared entity-level ledgers with the schedules to support them.
Where a transaction could not be resolved against supporting evidence, we documented it for management review rather than allocating it on judgement. That slowed parts of the work, and it was the right call. A clean-up that reaches a tidy answer by guessing at the difficult transactions leaves a group with books that look correct and cannot be defended in an audit.
Each entity then received its own configured accounting environment, with defined routines for recording, allocating and reconciling transactions. We reviewed the tax position and audit-readiness requirements, and trained the people doing the work on multi-entity processing, so the structure holds after we leave.
The outcome
- Financial activity cleanly separated across all three entities
- Intercompany balances identified, quantified and reconciled
- Missing accounting records reconstructed and organised
- Every transaction traceable to a supporting document
- Reliable receivables, payables and cash figures for each business
- Entity-level reporting structures in place
- Improved readiness for tax filing and statutory audit
- Finance staff trained to maintain the separation
Does this sound familiar?
Turning technology into business results
These engagements show how we work. Each began with an operational problem rather than a piece of software.
