Case study: a multi-entity SaaS business gets a finance function

The client is a photo management SaaS for schools, with entities in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. When Lowe CFO Advisory was engaged in early 2026 the group had a bookkeeper and an external accountant, but no one producing a single view of the business each month, and the founder was running the company on bank balances.

What we did

We started with the ledgers. Reconciling the three Xero files uncovered two accounting gaps that had been hiding the true cost base: depreciation had stopped being booked part way through the year, and cloud hosting costs, the largest cost of delivering the product, were being capitalised almost entirely instead of expensed against revenue. Correcting both changed the gross margin the board had been looking at.

With the numbers reliable, we built a consolidated monthly management pack across the Australian, US and UK entities, with a group P&L, balance sheet and cash position in one currency, and a rolling cash flow forecast that the founder could use to answer the question he was actually being asked: how long does the money last, and what changes that.

What changed

The board went from a set of unreconciled ledgers to a monthly pack it could rely on: a corrected cost base, a consolidated view across three countries, and a cash runway that was updated every month rather than estimated. Decisions about spend and funding were made on the same numbers the accountant would later sign off, instead of on a bank balance.

Published with the client’s permission. Figures have been left out at their request.