The first 100 days after close get a lot of attention for the things that show up on a deal thesis — commercial pipeline, pricing, the management team. The back office rarely makes that list, right up until it's the reason a value-creation plan slips a quarter.
That's not a coincidence. Back-office gaps in a newly-acquired business are usually invisible at diligence, because a founder-run or lightly-institutionalised company can limp along on tribal knowledge for years. What diligence checks is whether the numbers are broadly right. What the first 100 days test is whether the numbers arrive on time, every month, without someone chasing them.
Here's what actually needs to be true, in order.
1. You can close the month within 10 working days
Not eventually — within the first full month post-close. If the business has been closing in three weeks with a spreadsheet held together by one person's memory, that's not a quirk to fix later. It's the single biggest early indicator of whether your reporting cadence to the board and your lenders is going to hold up under real scrutiny. A slow close doesn't just delay information — it delays every decision downstream of that information.
2. Someone owns the reporting pack, by name
Not "finance," a named person or function. Boards and lenders don't want a different format every quarter depending on who compiled it. The pack needs a fixed structure, a fixed owner, and a fixed delivery date, from month one — not built ad hoc once someone asks for it.
3. AP and AR are under control, not under someone's desk
It's common to find accounts payable and receivable running through a single person's inbox with no formal process — approvals happening over WhatsApp, supplier queries answered from memory, aged debt nobody's tracking systematically. This is exactly the kind of thing that looks fine until it doesn't: a key person leaves, a supplier dispute escalates, or DSO creeps up and nobody notices until cash is tight. Within 100 days, AP and AR need a documented process that survives someone being on holiday.
4. HR and payroll administration is compliant, not just functional
"It's always worked" is not the same as "it's compliant." Contracts, right-to-work documentation, and payroll processing are the areas most likely to have quiet gaps in a business that's grown faster than its admin — gaps that don't cost anything until an employment tribunal or an HMRC review finds them. This is a checklist item, not a nice-to-have: audit it properly in the first 100 days, don't wait for it to surface on its own.
5. Procurement and vendor spend is visible in one place
Portfolio companies frequently discover, post-close, that spend is scattered across a dozen supplier relationships with no consolidated view — duplicate subscriptions, unmanaged contract renewals, no leverage on pricing because nobody's looking at the total picture. Getting spend visible is usually the fastest, lowest-risk margin improvement available in the first 100 days, and it's almost always sitting there unclaimed.
6. There's a plan for scaling admin with headcount — not just absorbing it
If the value-creation plan involves meaningful headcount growth, ask now: who onboards those people, who processes their expenses, who manages their leave requests, who runs recruitment administration at volume? If the answer is "the same person doing it today, just working longer hours," that's a constraint on the growth plan itself, not a detail to solve later.
Why this is a 100-day problem, not a year-one problem
Every one of these gaps is cheap to fix in month one and expensive to fix in month nine. Early on, you're building processes on a relatively clean slate. By the time the business has scaled past the point where the gaps were tolerable, you're rebuilding processes under pressure, usually right when the board is asking hardest questions about why the numbers are late or unreliable.
This is also precisely the work that doesn't require — and shouldn't require — pulling your management team's attention away from the commercial plan they were hired to execute. Fixing the back office is operational, not strategic. It needs specialists who've done this audit before, not the CEO's evenings.
What we do with this checklist
This is close to the audit we run in the first weeks of every engagement: the Understand stage of how we work. It covers finance & accounting, HR & people operations, procurement, facilities, customer operations and talent acquisition.
We find the gaps, move day-to-day execution to our offshore team, automate the repeatable steps and put AI agents to work wherever the controls allow. Your management team's first 100 days stay focused on the value-creation plan, and the lower cost of running the back office flows straight to EBITDA, and at exit, to enterprise value.