Financial Diagnostics

Something is off. Revenue looks reasonable. The bank account tells a different story. Margins feel softer than they should be given what you're billing. Cash is tighter than the income statement suggests it should be. You're not losing money — but you're not building wealth at the rate the work justifies. You know the symptoms. The cause is somewhere in the numbers. You just haven't had anyone look hard enough to find it.

Financial diagnostics is where every Bibeka engagement begins. Not because it's a formality — because the financial picture is the X-ray. Everything else follows from reading it correctly.

Most small business owners have a bookkeeper who records what happened and an accountant who files what the bookkeeper recorded. Neither of those relationships is designed to analyse the business — to benchmark the margin structure, identify cost drift, trace the cash conversion cycle, or map the relationship between revenue growth and working capital consumption.

The financial diagnosis that a CFO would run on a $200M company has never been systematically applied at the $5M level. The questions are the same. The access hasn't been.

We read your financial statements the way a seasoned operator would — not to confirm what you already know, but to find what you don't. We analyse your margin structure by product, service line, customer, or location — wherever the real picture is hidden underneath the aggregate. We trace your cash conversion cycle to understand where money is tied up and why.

We benchmark your key financial ratios against Statistics Canada's industry-specific data for your NAICS code, so you know not just what your numbers are but whether they're where they should be. We identify the gap between your reported profitability and the cash your business is actually generating — and explain it in plain language.

The output is a written diagnostic — a clear, specific picture of your financial health, where the pressure is coming from, and what the highest-leverage financial improvements are, in order of priority. Available as a standalone engagement or as the foundation of a broader advisory engagement.