The engagement
The Situation Assessment
Two weeks, across your reporting — the workflows that produce it, and the data underneath. An independent finding on whether your numbers can prove what your organization actually did, and whether your management team can decide on them.
The question
When someone with standing to ask — a funder, a regulator, a lender, your own board — asks what a given number is built on, can you answer from your systems, or do you assemble the answer by hand?
Most organizations between $5M and $50M don’t know which one they are until they look. You’re large enough to carry serious reporting obligations and small enough that no one owns the data end to end. The honest answer is usually somewhere in between, and the interesting part is where.
That’s what the Situation Assessment establishes. Not a diagnosis I bring with me — a finding I reach after looking.
Reporting is the obligation. Deciding is the point. A number that satisfies an outside party and a number a management team can act on are not the same thing. The second has to be current enough to still be true, granular enough to say which part of the organization it came from, and consistent enough that the comparison to last quarter means something. Most organizations pass the first test and quietly fail the second.
What I find, and what it costs you
Four things account for most of what I see. Most organizations have two of them, and can feel them long before they can name them. Naming them is most of the value.
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The number cannot be traced
A figure goes out in a report and nobody can walk it back to the records it came from. It is probably right. Nobody can demonstrate that it is.
the question is unanswerable at the moment it is asked, which is the only moment it matters. -
Two people produce two answers
The same question, asked of two competent staff members, returns different figures — because the definition lives in habit rather than anywhere written down. Each is following a rule. They are not the same rule.
reconciliation time before every deadline, and a quiet loss of confidence in all the other numbers. -
The reporting runs on one person
One individual knows how the spreadsheet works, which tabs are stale, and which column to ignore. They are usually excellent. That is the problem — their competence is what has kept the gap invisible.
an organization that cannot report on itself for a quarter if that person leaves, and no way to price the risk in advance. -
The numbers arrive too late to act on
Everything reconciles eventually. But it reconciles in arrears and in aggregate, so it can tell you what happened last year and not which part of the organization is drifting this month.
decisions made on instinct while the data that would have informed them is still being assembled.
The arithmetic on the last point is not complicated, and almost nobody has done it. Ask how many staff-hours a single reporting cycle consumes, and whose hours they are. Multiply by how many times a year that cycle runs. Four hours a week is five working weeks — at a senior salary, real money, spent proving work you have already done.
What I assess
Over two weeks I trace your data from where the work happens through to where it gets reported — the workflows in between included — and test it against five criteria:
- Provenance — for each number you report externally, can it be traced back to a source record? Which numbers can’t?
- Reproducibility — if two staff members produced the same report independently, would they agree? Where do the discrepancies come from?
- Cost to produce — actual staff-hours consumed assembling reports, board packets and compliance filings.
- Coverage — what your organization does versus what your data records. The gap between them is what you currently cannot prove, regardless of how well the work is actually done.
- Continuity — what happens to your reporting if the person who knows the spreadsheet leaves.
What I guarantee. Every figure in your most recent external report traced back to the source record it came from — or named as one that can’t be, which is itself the finding — within ten business days of getting access. If I don’t deliver that, you don’t pay.
What you walk away with
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An answer, in writing
Each criterion rated, each material weakness stated plainly with the evidence behind it — including when the finding is that nothing is wrong.
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A number against the cost
What your reporting actually consumes in staff-hours, multiplied out to an annual figure you can put in front of a board.
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Broken separated from untidy
Which weaknesses would survive real scrutiny, and which are merely inelegant and can be safely left alone.
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A decision, not a reading exercise
Findings your management team can act on directly, ranked by what they cost you rather than by how interesting they are.
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A plan for fixing it
What to do about each weakness, in what order, and what it takes to do it — priced, if you want me to do the work.
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Someone who can do the build
Fifteen years of building the systems in question. Most assessments end with a finding nobody can act on; this one doesn't have to.
How it runs
Two weeks, and the work is mostly conversations. I speak with everyone who touches the numbers — not only the people who sign the report, but the ones who assemble it. The person doing the work every day knows where the bottleneck is; the person presenting the result usually doesn’t. Then read-only access to the systems, and follow-ups to close whatever the conversations left open.
Your cost during the two weeks: two or three conversations with the people who touch the data, and read-only access. No system changes, no software, nothing switched off.
I don’t do the forty-five-minute version. An organization you can assess in an afternoon doesn’t have a problem worth assessing, and one that does is messier than an afternoon can hold. A short call is a useful conversation, and I’m glad to have one — it just isn’t an assessment, and I’d rather not call it one.
This is a paid engagement, priced against the size of the organization. I’ll quote it on the first call, once I know what’s actually in scope. If you go on to have the work done, the fee comes off the build.
What happens next
Most assessments end with a finding and a handshake, and the organization is exactly where it started — now with a document about it. That isn’t much use to you.
Where there is something to fix, it falls into four things — and the order is the part people get wrong.
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Process
Find what is actually broken before touching a tool. Some of it is a decision nobody has made rather than a system nobody has built.
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Workflows
Remove the manual steps and the re-entry between systems — the places where the same fact gets typed a second and third time.
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Data structure
One place the organization can be asked a question and answer it, with the definitions written down rather than carried in someone's head.
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Intelligence on top
Only once the foundation underneath is clean and trustworthy. This is the step everyone wants to start at.
Most of the value is in the first three, and the fourth does not work without them. An organization that cannot reproduce its own reported numbers will not be rescued by putting a model in front of them; it will get the same unreliable answer faster and with more confidence.
I build these systems, and in most cases I’m the one who does the work that follows — quoted separately, agreed once you have the findings and can see what you’re buying. Where I’d have an interest in a recommendation, I’ll say so before we start rather than after. And if you’d rather have someone else implement it, the report is written to be usable that way.
Who I am
Ravikanth Andhavarapu — independent director and audit committee chair of a publicly listed company (BSE, India); 15+ years building data platforms and engineering teams. Currently acting CTO at Wraffle; formerly Head of Strategy at Biliti Electric and founding engineering lead at several ventures. IIT Madras.
I work with a small number of organizations at a time.
Next step
A 30-minute conversation. Bring your most recent external report — to a funder, a lender, a regulator, or your board — and I’ll tell you on the call whether an assessment would find anything worth the two weeks. If it wouldn’t, I’ll say so.