Upcoming projects many times involve a contract where interpretation is helpful.  First, my contract review services are not the same as what an attorney does, nor is it a substitute for such. Usually, the interpretation part of the review is something along the line of what effect will the contract have on accounting? What extra work will this great contract create? What is the contract leaving out which may cost just as much as the projected savings.  This comes in many examples, but one will be presented here.

A financial services firm signed on for a new service to help with proposed stock trades. Once implemented, the service far exceeded expectations. What was missing was a reporting section on the back-end to track and to calculate the gain or loss when the trade was closed (sold) or which internal department the trade was associated with. This was a large firm with hundreds of trades per day.  The cost of reconciling the transactions was expensive both in time and missed deadlines for catching errors.  The firm was so enamored with the new system the focus was on the the front end, which turned out to be greater than anticipated, that they simply didn’t ask these questions. In this case, when the back-end question came up, management simple said “those are details for the accounting staff to work out”. The resulting cost of this oversight was well into six figures, far in excess of the cost of the system.  I got involved to create an automated Excel based system to reduce the back end accounting to two hours per day for one person compared to 6-8 hours per day for six people.

From a Contract Review perspective this lack of a back-end feature should have be caught before the contract was signed. This is just one of many examples of what I may see in such a review. From a Fix-It perspective I have done hundreds of these types of projects. While Excel is the primary tool, they are not really an “Excel Project”. It is the development of a complete automatic system to accomplish a specific objective which almost always saves substantial time and money.

Many times, my engagement may be to simply compare several contracts received. Think of this a side-by-side comparison.  But it’s more than the mechanics of the comparison, it’s also my insight, catching missing concepts, back-end effect (as noted above), and other concepts that my experience and skill set brings to the table.  Many times the review is simply a second set of eyes, a quick project.

These services have been performed for and are offered to large publicly traded to companies and down to small understaffed nonprofit organizations.