Overhauling an Entire Operation for a $450K Discovery

ABC Contracting Company Overhauls Its Entire Operation

Client:

ABC Contracting Company is a Canadian commercial contractor, incorporated roughly two and a half years ago and approaching seven figures in annual revenue. The company delivers installation and build-out packages for larger builders and property clients, and runs lean: an owner-operator, a small office function, a payroll crew, and a rotating bench of subcontractors. Growth came fast, and the administrative side never scaled with it. Bookkeeping passed through more than one set of hands and more than one platform, and every transition left sediment behind.

Challenges:

The books had been migrated between platforms as a raw bank feed: imported, balanced, and never coded. Transfers between the operating and savings accounts were landing in income. Nearly $100,000 of credit card payments were landing in expenses. Revenue and costs were both inflated by activity that was neither, so every report the owner saw was wrong in both directions.

Roughly $452,000 in customer payments sat in uncategorized income, never applied to the invoices they paid, which left $375,184 of receivables on the books that nobody could trust. Subcontractor payments were scattered across catch-all accounts, so T5018 contractor slips, a CRA filing obligation for construction businesses, could not be produced at all, and a GST balance of $54,924 could not be verified.

Other Considerations & Issues:

• Email lived on shared web hosting. The company's mail ran on the same shared server as its website, one outage away from losing the channel every quote, purchase order, and approval moved through.
• Nothing was written down. No employee handbook, no employment agreements, no vendor payment approvals, and no intake for incoming tenders. One bid deadline had already been missed outright.
• Personal and corporate money were blurred. A personal credit card ran inside the corporate books with no shareholder loan treatment, entangling the owner's finances with the company's.

Solution:

Path 2 Profit started by refusing to guess. A full read-only diagnostic of the file, cross-checked against the prior bookkeeper's records and the bank, turned "the books are a mess" into a specific, quantified, sequenced defect list. Then four workstreams ran in parallel:

• Books and compliance. 1,389 transactions consolidated onto a single platform, with every balance sheet account verified against source before cutover. Distortions came out first, transfers and card payments reclassified off the P&L, then customer receipts traced to their invoices, subcontractor spend rebuilt into a true cost account, and a filable T5018 vendor list produced for the first time.
• Email and IT. Every mailbox moved from shared hosting to Google Workspace: staged on a subdomain, piloted on one account, then cut over on a weekend with mail history intact and no downtime on a working day.
• Reorganization. An employee handbook and employment agreement templates written from scratch, a documented vendor payment approval workflow, a proper expense reimbursement process, a tender intake list with 48 and 24 hour deadline reminders, and the contractor compliance profile a major customer requires, completed and maintained.
• Virtual support. A written weekly update every Friday covering what moved, what is blocked, and the short list of decisions only the owner can make, plus quote tracking, renewals, and follow-up so nothing sits for three weeks again.

What the Diagnostic Found:

The review read every account before recommending anything. Four findings drove the plan, and none of them were visible in the reports the owner had been relying on:

The scale of the coding gap is what made the trial balance so misleading. The one number everybody checks looked perfect while 96 cents of every expense dollar sat unlabelled:

Impact:

The company now runs on one accounting system instead of three. The first fiscal year is filed and reconciled with the accountant, the remaining cleanup is quantified and sequenced rather than guessed at, and the compliance exposure was found and scoped before it became an assessment. Email, hiring, vendor payments, reimbursements, and tender deadlines each have a written process, and a weekly rhythm keeps them moving. When a six-figure tender crosses the owner's desk, the numbers used to price it mean something.

The Consolidation, Verified

Category	Volume	Scope	Status
Transactions migrated	1,389	All record types	Verified to source
Balance sheet accounts	11	Matched at cutover	Exact match
Paper receipts	500+	Scanned and posted	Digitized

Before and After, Five Months In

Measure	Before	After	Change
Accounting systems	3	1	Consolidated
Company email	Shared web host	Google Workspace	Migrated
T5018 contractor slips	Unfilable	Filable	Compliance restored
Documented processes	None	5 live	Built from scratch

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Conclusion:

This company's trial balance tied out every single month while 96% of its expenses sat unlabelled, and nobody caught it, because the one number everybody checks looked fine. The recovery started with a diagnostic, not a cleanup: read the file first, so the work is sequenced instead of guessed at.

And it did not stop at the books. Email came off shared hosting, hiring and payments and tenders each got a written process, and a weekly update replaced guesswork. Five months in, the company has one reconciled source of truth, a known path to closing its open years, and an operation that holds together without the owner in the middle of it.