Book A Consult

CFO advisory for managed service providers

You know your revenue. The harder question is which contracts, which service lines, and which clients are actually making you money. That’s the work.
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The problem

Your gross margin is probably wrong

Not fraudulent, just misclassified. Technician wages sitting in operating expenses instead of cost of sales, vendor licences buried in a single line, project work mixed in with recurring. The result is a margin number that looks fine and tells you nothing.

Per-seat pricing drifts away from cost

You priced a client three years ago. Their seat count changed, your licence costs went up twice, and the contract never moved. Multiply that across your book and it becomes real money.

You don't know your client-level profit

Most MSPs can name their biggest client by revenue and have no idea which client is the most profitable. Those are frequently not the same client, and occasionally the biggest one is losing money.

What I do

  • Rebuild your chart of accounts so gross margin means something, with labour split correctly between delivery and overhead
  • Margin analysis by service line: managed services, projects, hardware, licence resale
  • Client-level profitability, ranked, with the unprofitable contracts named
  • Recurring revenue reporting that tracks movement, not just the total
  • Monthly reporting package with variance commentary, delivered while you can still act on it
  • Vendor cost pass-through analysis when licensing prices move
  • Cash flow forecasting, including the CRA remittances that catch people out

What's different

Most accountants can produce your financial statements. Fewer can tell you why your effective margin per seat dropped four points last year, or which of your agreements no longer covers its own delivery cost.

I work from your accounting data and your PSA export together. One without the other gives you half the picture, which is why the answer usually isn’t visible in QuickBooks alone.

This is advisory work, not just compliance. If what you need is a T2 filed and nothing else, I’m probably more than you need right now.

Questions

Do you replace our bookkeeper?
Not necessarily. Plenty of my MSP clients keep their bookkeeper for daily entry and use me for the analysis and the CFO layer. If the books need rebuilding first, that’s a defined project we’d scope separately.
Your accounting file, your PSA export, your agreement list, and your vendor invoices. I’ll send an exact list before we begin so nobody wastes a week guessing.
Yes, anywhere in Canada except Quebec. Most of my MSP work is Ontario-based, but the analysis doesn’t change at the provincial border.
It changes quite a lot, and the earlier you start the better. Buyers price recurring revenue quality, client concentration, and margin consistency. Those take a couple of years to improve, not a couple of months.

Mark Garcia, CPA · Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario · Serving clients across Canada · CRA authorized representative