Finance and operations consulting
Small organizations run their finances on memory, spreadsheets, and whoever happens to be free. That works until it very publicly does not. I build the books, the reporting, and the controls that let a small team operate like a much larger one.
Monthly close
Account coverage
Controls in writing
The usual situation
Most of the organizations I work with are well run in every respect except this one. Nobody chose to do finance this way. It accumulated, quietly, over several years, while everyone was busy doing the actual work.
How much cash do you actually have available?
Not the bank balance. The number after restricted funds, unpaid bills, and payroll are accounted for.
Which program or line is losing money?
If the answer takes more than a minute to find, decisions are being made on instinct rather than numbers.
Could you survive a funder or lender review?
Written policies, approval trails, documented vendors. Nobody misses any of it until somebody asks for all of it at once.
Is your board seeing the report the night before?
Reporting built once, correctly, refreshes in an afternoon instead of consuming a week every quarter.
The retainer
Most of what's above isn't a one-time problem. It's a job that never got staffed. Fractional controllership is me filling that job on an ongoing basis: monthly close, reporting that stays current, and someone accountable for the numbers between board meetings instead of only before them.
This is the option for organizations that don't need a project, they need the function to exist permanently, without the cost of a full-time hire.
What's included, monthly
From $3,000/month, scoped to your organization's size and complexity. One-time engagements below remain available on their own, or as a starting point before moving to a retainer.
Or, one thing at a time
Every engagement is scoped and fixed price, which means the number I quote is the number on the invoice. You keep every file and template when it is finished, whether this is a standalone project or the first step toward a retainer.
Undo the backlog. A chart of accounts rebuilt to match how you actually operate instead of how someone set it up in 2019, every account reconciled, and a close process your team can run without me.
A dashboard and reporting package that updates itself. Linked, formula driven, and legible to people who do not read financial statements for a living and would rather not start.
The written infrastructure auditors, lenders, and funders expect, scaled honestly for a team where one person already wears three hats.
When a number is wrong and nobody can say why. I trace it to the source, quantify it, and give you a written answer you can hand to a board or a bank.
Reporting
Representative of the reporting I build. Live formulas, no retyping numbers by hand, and figures anyone in the room can interpret without a finance background or a lengthy preamble.
Illustrative figures. Your package is built from your data, in your tools, and stays yours.
Experience
Downshift Systems is a solo practice, and that is deliberate. You work directly with the person doing the work, and that person has run finance and operations departments rather than advising them from a comfortable distance.
That work spans government, retail, and nonprofit organizations. Three sectors, one job. Reconciling accounts nobody has opened in a year. Rebuilding a chart of accounts that grew by accident rather than design. Writing the approval policy that really should have existed before the purchase currently under discussion. Turning a reporting cycle that eats a week into one that takes an afternoon.
The sector changes the vocabulary, not the problem. An agency calls it compliance, a retailer calls it margin and shrink, a nonprofit calls it restricted funds. Everyone is asking the same two questions: where did the money go, and can we prove it?
Credentials and systems
Process
The sequence matters. Nothing gets built on top of numbers that have not been verified first.
A free thirty minute call and a look at your current books. You leave with a written summary of what is working and what is not, whether or not you hire me.
A written proposal with a defined deliverable, a timeline, and one price. No hourly billing, which spares us both the monthly ritual of justifying a timesheet.
The work happens in your systems, not a parallel set of files. You get progress checkpoints so nothing arrives as a surprise at the end.
Documentation and a working session with whoever maintains it going forward. Your team should be able to run this without me, because a system that requires a consultant to operate is not a system. It is a subscription.
Start here
Thirty minutes, no cost, and no slide deck featuring a stock photo of a handshake. Send your last board report or profit and loss statement and I will tell you plainly what I would fix first.
Remote nationwide / Based in Metro Atlanta / Fixed price engagements