Free Self-Assessment
The Workflow Leakage Audit: Find where your money is quietly going.
A self-assessment for operations leaders. Score your sales-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and ops-to-finance workflows for leakage. Includes a 24-question scorecard, a leakage-cost worksheet, and a sample audit report from an anonymized client engagement.
Four tools, one envelope.
Everything an operations leader needs to find the leaks, quantify the cost, and build the case for the recovery.
The 24-question scorecard
Eight questions per workflow domain across sales-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and ops-to-finance. Each scored on a 1 to 5 scale. The total is your leakage index.
The leakage-cost worksheet
Plug your headcount, blended labor rate, and process volume into a cost model that converts each scorecard gap into an annual dollar figure.
A sample audit report
The full 40 to 50 page format we deliver to clients, anonymized. Shows you what a finished audit looks like before you commit to a paid engagement.
The 90-day recovery plan template
Once you know the leaks, the template helps you sequence the fixes by impact and effort. Quick wins first, structural fixes second, automation last.
Three example questions from the scorecard.
Each domain in the scorecard has eight questions like these. Each one maps to a known leakage pattern we have surfaced in client engagements.
Procure-to-pay · Question 4 of 8
How many of your supervisors update the budget control form daily as instructed?
Sales-to-cash · Question 2 of 8
What percent of your inbound deals require manual reconciliation between CRM and accounting?
Ops-to-finance · Question 6 of 8
What is the average time from work-completed to invoice-sent?
A 25-step process leaks more than you think.
Every workflow has handoffs. Every handoff is a place where information can drop, get re-keyed incorrectly, or wait. A typical 25-step business process has 8 manual handoffs, and our engagements consistently show that those handoffs leak roughly 32 percent of compliance against the documented procedure. Translation: about a third of the time, the work is not following the rules someone wrote down.
Leakage cost example
- 25-step process with 8 manual handoffs
- 32 percent compliance leakage across the handoffs
- 50-person operation, $80 per hour blended labor rate
- = roughly $240,000 per year in pure rework
That is on top of the original cost of doing the work the first time. Rework does not show up on a P&L line. It shows up as the team always being a little behind.
The audit surfaces every leak with a dollar figure attached. That is what makes it useful at the leadership table. You do not get to a recovery plan with hand-waving. You get there with a spreadsheet that shows where the money is going and what it would take to redirect it.
$90K leak on a single project. The audit caught it.
One of the worked examples in the audit comes from California's largest hillside structural engineering firm. On a single project, change orders were not being added to the budget control form as the work progressed. The supervisors had been told to update the form daily. They were not. The leak compounded across the project lifecycle.
By the time the audit was run, the gap between authorized scope and actual work performed was roughly $90,000. That is one project. Across the firm's active portfolio at any given time, the headline leakage was more than half a million dollars in any given quarter.
The audit did not stop the leak by itself. The audit surfaced it. Once leadership saw the dollar figure, the fix was straightforward: the budget control form became part of an automated daily check, and the supervisors received a friction-light reminder when entries were missing. Compliance jumped from 18 percent to 96 percent inside two weeks.
The full story is in the structural engineering case study. What the audit guide gives you is the same diagnostic framework, ready to run on your own workflows.
Send me the scorecard, worksheet, and sample report.
All four tools, delivered to your inbox. Plus a one-page guide on how to use them at your next leadership offsite.
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The full audit kit
Scorecard PDF, calculator spreadsheet, sample audit report, and the 90-day recovery template.
A short read on how to use it
Two pages. How to score, how to weight by impact, and what to do with the results before your next leadership meeting.
An invite to the diagnostic
If you want a paid second opinion after running the audit yourself, the 30-day operations diagnostic is the next step. No pressure to take it.
Stop guessing where the money is going.
The audit gives you a number. Once you have a number, the conversation about what to fix is short.