Payments do not break in the middle. They break at the handoffs.
Money moves through your business in a sequence. It is invoiced, it arrives, it settles, it gets matched, it posts, it gets reported, and the exceptions go somewhere. Each step usually works.
The damage happens between them. A reference that existed at the start does not survive to the ledger. A field gets stripped moving between systems. A decision gets made in an email thread and is not retained. By the time anyone notices, the fix is manual and the cost is invisible because it is spread across people who are used to it.
Invoice to close is the span. The handoffs are where the work is.
Two ways to begin — depending on what is happening inside the business
Both are fixed-scope, vendor-neutral and priced. Neither is a prerequisite for the other. Which one fits depends on whether something is breaking now or something is about to change.
Something is breaking
Invoice-to-Close Diagnostic
$4,500 CAD + HST
A visible problem inside one payment flow: reconciliation, remittance handling, cash application, fragmented information, control or ownership.
- Scope
- One entity or business unit. One flow — receivables or payables, not both. Within that flow: one ERP, up to three providers or channels, up to three stakeholder interviews and a 90-day sample.
- Delivery
- Five business days after all required inputs are received.
Where information, money and the accounting record separate between invoice and close, why it matters, and what should happen next.
Something is changing
Payments Modernization Roadmap Sprint
$18,000 CAD + HST
An ERP or finance transformation, an automation or AI initiative, a new platform or provider, an acquisition or expansion, or an operating-model redesign.
- Scope
- One defined business or technology initiative. The payment flows, systems, operating dependencies and controls that initiative affects. Up to five stakeholder interviews.
- Duration
- Approximately three weeks.
What the payments channel must support — defined before you commit to technology, providers or implementation decisions.
If you are not sure which applies, that is what the thirty-minute conversation is for. Some of those calls end with a recommendation to do nothing yet.
I spent thirty years on the other side of the contract you are trying to get out of.
Most people advising you on payments have either sold payments or examined them. I did the first for three decades, at Global Payments Canada, at PSiGate, at Bell, building the channel relationships and the integrations that businesses like yours are now living inside.
Which is why I can tell you what actually breaks if you leave your provider. Your provider will not. The one trying to win you will understate it. Your ERP partner knows their half. It is a short list of people who can answer that question honestly, and being on it is the only real credential I have.
I started as a credit officer. The job teaches you one thing: when the numbers do not close, go and find out why.
What one flow can and cannot tell you
The Diagnostic examines one flow properly rather than all of them superficially. That is a deliberate trade, and it has a consequence worth stating before you buy anything.
The findings document separates three things and labels them:
- What is established within the flow examined. Evidenced, and the evidence is shown.
- What it suggests about the rest of the business. Reasoned inference, named as inference rather than as finding.
- What would require broader work to answer. Stated plainly, including what that work would involve.
One flow does not set your modernization priorities. It gives you one properly evidenced input, and an honest account of what it does not cover.
