From 3 years of messy books to a clean exit

The situation

They were building something genuinely impressive. Hardware, deep tech, a product roadmap that was turning heads. What they weren't building was a finance function. By the time they came to IBEX, they had three years of QuickBooks entries that were part guesswork, part wishful thinking. Revenue recognition was inconsistent. Inter company transactions were a mess. Their cap table and their books told two different stories. None of that was obvious to them until a strategic acquirer showed up and started asking questions.

What we found

Getting under the hood took about two weeks. What we found was a common pattern for startups at this stage: the company had grown faster than its financial infrastructure.

• Chart of accounts set up in year one and never touched again
• COGS and operating expenses mixed together in ways that made gross margin impossible to calculate accurately
• No depreciation schedules on equipment that had been on the books for two years
• Convertible notes with no accrued interest

The books weren't unfixable. They just needed someone to actually fix them.

What we did

We ran a full historical cleanup across all three years, rebuilt the chart of accounts from scratch, and restated their financials into GAAP-compliant P&Ls and balance sheets their acquirer's diligence team could actually work with. We also built out the board reporting package and forecast model they needed to answer the questions a deal team asks: burn, runway, revenue quality, and margin by product line. The founder didn't have to explain what any number meant. The diligence team didn't have to ask twice.

The result

The acquisition closed. The acquirer's finance team called their books the cleanest they'd ever seen for a company of this size and stage. The founder called us two weeks after close. Just to say thank you.