Profit Leak Audit

Send us an extract from your current system — SAP, Epicor, Infor, NetSuite, Dynamics, QuickBooks, or spreadsheets. In 10 working days you get your margin leaks quantified in dollars. We do not need to know your system in advance, and we are not proposing you replace it.

Why now. Two cost shocks landed on the same products in the same quarter. US tariffs were rewritten three times in 2026 — the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February, a flat 10% ran until 24 July, and since then duty depends on country of origin and classification per item. And diesel set an all-time US record of $5.90 a gallon on 8 September 2026, crude averaged $91 a barrel in August, fuel surcharges are up roughly 300% and truckload rates about 15% year on year — and the EIA's September outlook says elevated energy costs persist through 2026. A cost surge does not create margin leaks; it makes existing blind spots expensive. The companies repricing in weeks are the ones who can see which products and customers absorb the increase.

What you get

Finding	What we quantify
Products and customers losing money	Contribution margin fully loaded — landed cost, inbound and outbound freight, rebates, returns, discounts. Typically 5-15% of SKUs and 3-8% of customers are negative once everything is counted.
Cash frozen in inventory	Value on hand versus 12-month consumption, per item, plus reorder points still set on pre-2024 lead times. 26% of US distributors report 6-10% deadstock; typically 10-25% of inventory value has not moved in a year.
The real cost of expediting	Rush shipments, premium freight, overtime, and the orders that shipped late because of them.
Yield and standard-cost drift	Actual versus standard consumption per production order. Every quote you issue rests on these numbers.
Landed cost after tariffs	Duty and freight per item by country of origin. US tariffs changed three times in 2026 — flat 10% until 24 July, then a two-tier 10%/12.5% Section 301 rate by origin. Products priced on the old assumption are often the ones now losing money.
Hours spent on work the system could do	Manual re-keying, reconciliations, the report someone rebuilds every Monday.
Process and decision findings	Approvals nobody uses, duplicate masters, and — candidly — money already spent on the wrong project.

How it works

NDA first. Signed before we see anything. Your data stays in the project environment and trains nothing.
You send an extract. Sales orders, purchases, inventory movements, production orders, AR — 12 to 24 months, in whatever format your system exports. CSV is fine. If you can't extract it, we'll tell you how.
We analyse it with AI. That is what makes this affordable: cross-referencing two years of imperfect data across products, customers, lots and orders is exactly what AI does well and what a consultant cannot do by hand at this price.
You get the report in 10 working days. Leaks ranked by dollars, with what it takes to close each one and an estimate of the effort.
One working session to walk through it with your team. The report is yours either way.

Price

Fixed fee, $2,500-$5,000 depending on data volume and number of entities — agreed in writing before we start. Credited in full if you later engage us on the work. And if the report does not find leaks worth more than its fee, you don't pay it.

What this is not

It is not an ERP sales call. Most findings are pricing, purchasing and process decisions you can act on with the system you already have.
It is not a Lean workshop. No week-long kaizen, no facilitator. We work from your data, not from post-its.
It is not accounting. Your accountant tells you what happened, accurately and in aggregate. This tells you where it happened — by SKU, customer, order and production run.
We won't recommend a migration to sell one. If your system can genuinely give you what you need, we'll say so. If it can't, that will be one finding among several, with numbers attached, and the decision stays yours.

Why us

We have rebuilt and migrated ERPs for two decades, so we read messy operational data for what it is — not as a spreadsheet exercise.
We use AI in every phase of our delivery work, which is why a diagnosis that used to be a $40,000 consulting engagement is a fixed fee here.
Microsoft certified MB-800 and MB-820; seven Business Central apps published; teams in Europe and across several US states.
Everything we do is paid on acceptance. This audit included.

A real finding

A US distribution company we have worked with for two years had previously spent roughly $2 million on an SAP integration it did not need — a system scoped for a company several times its size, approved without an independent assessment of whether the requirement was real. The money was gone. What the analysis recovered was the decision process, plus the operational findings underneath it: high staff turnover meant process knowledge lived in people rather than in the system, so every departure cost re-learning and errors. Neither of those appears as a line in any P&L. Both were larger than the freight increase everyone was talking about. Named reference available under NDA.

Request the audit

Tell us what system you run and roughly how many order lines a year. We reply within one working day with the fixed fee and the data list.