She kept her best records in Excel, so I built around Excel

House of Basmatti sells a lot, across three stores. People come back. By most measures it was a healthy business. But sales lived in the software, expenses lived somewhere else, and nobody had a single answer to a simple question: are we making money?

Before I proposed anything, I asked how records were actually kept. Not how they were supposed to be kept, how they actually were.

The best record in the business turned out to be a detailed Excel log of expenses, updated daily by the owner. It was good. It was complete. And it sat entirely outside the software the business paid for.

I didn't argue her out of it. I built around it.

To find out how the business had really done, I reconstructed five years of history from bank data and her own log. It was slow work, and every number had to earn its place.

On 7 September I visited the stores in person and mapped how each of the three works: the recipes, the units of measure, the quirks of each kitchen. From that I wrote a setup and process guide.

Back at my desk I cleaned up and rebuilt the menu, with 64 recipes costed, and retired the old items that were cluttering the catalogue.

She didn't take my proposal on trust. She reviewed it and came back with hard questions. I answered every one, point by point, including a clear exit if the targets weren't met.

A pilot with an exit is one you can say yes to. She returned her verification tracker on 27 September.

Then came the report she had never had: twelve months, reconciled. I used the bank as the anchor and refused to add up four overlapping sources of data. Six bank accounts and 11,066 transactions, reconciled exactly.

Three judgement calls moved the profit figure more than any amount of data cleaning: how to treat owner withdrawals, how to treat a five-year lease, and how to classify unlabelled spend. I made each call openly and explained it.

And the answer she had been missing: the business was profitable on a cash basis, and cash had grown over the year.

The pilot is under way, the set-up is done, and the business has a report its owner can trust. She knows which parts of the business make money, and where the money goes.