Messy Data Isn't an Accounting Problem. It's a Price Problem.

The week-one request list

Thirty-six months of profit and loss by month. Revenue by customer by month. A contract database with start date, end date, notice period and price. A deferred revenue schedule. And the recurring-revenue bridge.

The bridge is what breaks people: opening recurring revenue, plus new, plus expansion, minus contraction, minus churn, equals closing. Most firms have never built one and cannot build one retrospectively, because the underlying events were never tagged when they happened.

Speed of close is a signal

A monthly close inside ten business days is the baseline expectation. Firms closing in thirty or more are telling a buyer that management runs on instinct rather than numbers.

Messy data adds four to eight weeks to diligence. Every extra month is another month of trading the buyer gets to see, and another opportunity to re-price on a weak one. Long processes break more often than short ones.

Where the cost actually lands

Owners treat reporting as overhead to be minimised — a finance problem, another system nobody wants to fund. But a buyer prices uncertainty into the multiple, not into a cost line.

Sloppy data does not cost you the €40k of the fix. It costs you a turn of EBITDA.