Solhver

What It’s Worth

Understanding the business has a dollar value

Taking ownership means learning which people, processes, and systems keep the business working. Some of the most important things you’ve acquired won’t come with instructions.

We uncover that working knowledge and put it to use: planning integrations, identifying where cash gets stuck, and helping AI implementation partners understand the processes and data their tools need to work. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Selected examples from our work. Figures are rounded and identifying details withheld. Each example represents a separate situation.

01

Preserving working knowledge

Years of experience can leave before you know what you’ve lost

10,000 purchase orders a year. One undocumented dependency.

An accounts payable operation processing approximately 10,000 purchase orders annually depended on one remote worker absent from the staff list and org chart. The entire company’s AP contacts and working instructions were kept in one personal Google Doc. Solhver documented their cheat sheet and flagged the dependency for leadership.

An entire accounts payable operation depended on a remote employee approaching retirement. They weren’t on the staff list or org chart. We found them by following the inventory process: their name kept coming up.

Their contacts and working instructions lived in a cheat sheet in a personal Google Doc. They had developed the methods that kept things moving, but that knowledge hadn’t become part of the business’s documented processes.

What we did

We documented the cheat sheet and identified the dependency so leadership could address it before a departure forced the issue.

What that means for a new owner

When you’re learning a business, or an unfamiliar industry, you may not yet recognize whose experience you rely on. Finding those people early gives you time to learn from them, support them, and prepare others to carry the work forward.

An org chart tells you who reports to whom. It doesn’t always tell you who everyone calls.

02

Getting completed work billed

You’ve paid for the work. Now get it billed

Technicians finish the work, but the office still needs enough information to prepare the invoice. Missing details mean follow-up calls, manual searches, and completed jobs waiting to be billed.

Partnership with MSI Data

ServicePro by MSI Data

25%reduction in time to invoice with AI-generated invoice notes.

With MSI Data, we help establish where that information lives, what billing needs, and how it moves between systems. That understanding supports AI-generated invoice notes that reduce manual preparation and get completed work billed sooner.

What that looks like in practice

On a recent visit to Texas, a biller showed us the AI prompts she used to prepare invoice notes. For every invoice, she gathered the information, copied it into AI, and moved the result back into the business system.

She had worked out a useful solution. She was also doing the integration herself.

Understanding her process helped define what MSI’s agents needed to find, understand, and move, giving the office more time for work that needs its judgment.

Why the partnership matters

MSI invites an independent team to see how its customers actually work, including the inconvenient bits. That willingness to hear candid feedback helps connect product development to the problems customers need solved.

What that means for an owner

Payroll, parts, and operating expenses continue while completed jobs wait to be invoiced. Shortening that wait gets invoices to customers sooner and starts the collection process earlier.

Works with

  • Epicor Prophet 21
  • Oracle NetSuite
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365Business Central
  • Sage 100
  • Salesforce Field Service
  • Service Pro FSM by MSI Data
See MSI’s Time-to-Invoice →

Invoice timing and payment time

Published commercial-contractor data from BuildOps

BuildOps reports average payment times of 51.63, 56.82, and 85.44 days for invoices sent zero to ten, ten to twenty, and more than twenty days after job completion respectively. These are external industry observations, not measured Solhver or MSI outcomes.

Source: BuildOps. Observed industry averages, rounded. Not Solhver or MSI engagement results.

03

Knowing what work is actually left

Some of the backlog had already become an invoice

Approximately $3M reported. Under $1M remaining.

Reported backlog was approximately three million dollars. Actual work remaining was less than one million dollars. The second bar shows an upper bound, not an exact value.

~3.5 months

reported

Fewer than 4 weeks

remaining

While studying scheduling, we found a project manager’s local spreadsheet that accurately tracked open work. Comparing it with the sales backlog revealed completed, fully invoiced jobs still being counted as future work, including individual projects worth $200K–$300K.

The reported three and a half months of work was actually fewer than four weeks.

How it was addressed

We revamped the sales process and automated backlog reporting so completed jobs stopped appearing as future work.

What that means for an owner

Leadership could pursue new work, revise cash expectations, and plan capacity against the actual schedule. There was time to respond before the apparent pipeline became an empty calendar.

04

Getting the costs into the numbers

The parts left the shelf. The costs stayed behind

Approximately $330K in unrecorded inventory costs over 12 months.

Approximately 65 percent of inventory transactions lacked appropriate costing in this example. Approximately 330,000 dollars in unrecorded inventory costs were identified across the twelve months examined.

Parts were being used and invoiced without their costs being recorded properly. Roughly 65% of inventory transactions lacked appropriate costing, overstating inventory and understating costs.

We traced the issue through how parts were selected, used, and entered into the system. The process had affected years of activity; the $330K finding covered the 12 months reviewed.

How it was addressed

We revamped inventory processes, introduced exception reporting to flag items without recorded costs, and carried out a warehouse restructure to improve how parts were tracked and used.

What that means for an owner

Purchasing, pricing, and margin decisions depend on knowing what the work actually costs. Correcting the process helps stop the discrepancy from growing with every transaction.

A healthy-looking margin is more useful when the parts are included.

05

Keeping the fleet working

The fleet comes with the business. So does the maintenance

$42K to bring 27 vehicles back to service condition.

A 27-vehicle fleet had ten months of suspended maintenance before sale. Approximately 30 percent had over 250,000 miles. Upfront costs identified to restore service condition were approximately 42,000 dollars.

Conversations with warehouse staff and technicians revealed that fleet maintenance had been suspended for ten months before the sale. Around 30% of the vehicles had more than 250,000 miles, with overdue service and tire replacements among the immediate needs.

How it was addressed

We implemented Fleetio to manage maintenance and restructured fleet replacement plans and lease arrangements to address overdue vehicle needs.

What that means for an owner

The incoming owner could plan for the immediate $42K cash requirement, schedule repairs, and prioritize replacements. Those decisions could happen before breakdowns began making the schedule for them.

Taking ownership? Start with what keeps it working

We help new owners and integration teams understand the people, processes, and systems they now depend on, and establish what to preserve, what needs attention, and what to change first.

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