Ten Years of Fixing Finance Functions – What We’ve Learned

Marking ten years of Virgate with what actually changed in building finance functions, and what never should

Ten years ago, the starting point behind Virgate was simple: most growing businesses don’t have a numbers problem, they have a visibility problem.

We’ve spent a decade building finance functions for multi-site and multi-entity businesses, and the same pattern shows up again and again.

A reporting problem, mistaken for a numbers problem. A process problem, mistaken for a people problem. A visibility problem, mistaken for a data problem.

Ten years in, it felt right to mark the milestone properly – not with another how-to, but with what we’ve actually learned building finance functions for businesses like yours.

Here’s what ten years of fixing finance functions has taught us.

One multi-site group we’ve worked with for years started out with board numbers arriving weeks after period end.

Today the board gets a weekly flash report with like-for-like sales and site-by-site commentary, a monthly pack consolidated across the whole group, and trading data sitting alongside the ledger – with a three-way match checking every supplier invoice against the purchase order and the goods actually received before anything gets paid.

But the real shift isn’t what the board sees. Site managers and department heads now have their own interactive reporting, built around their part of the business – because decisions happen sooner when the person closest to the problem can see it too.

The numbers in the accounts only tell half the story. Operational data – sales, labour, footfall – explains why they moved.

That’s why we built our own reporting platform rather than relying on spreadsheets rebuilt by hand every month: one source that reporting, reviews, and period-end checks all run from, customised around what each client’s board actually needs to see.

Automation isn’t new to us either. We’ve used robotic process automation for years on reconciliations and repetitive tasks, and we’re now adding AI on top for the checks that need more judgement – coding consistency, accruals, period-end reviews. Clients don’t see any of it. They just see the numbers arrive faster, with the context that explains them.

In the early days, it was tempting to solve every problem with more effort from good people. That works – but only for so long.

Standard processes, a proper chart of accounts, solid data foundations – they felt like overhead back then. They’re actually what let us grow without the quality slipping.

It’s the same advice we’d give any business scaling its finance function: the foundations that feel like they can wait are usually the ones you’ll wish you’d built first.

For a while, we said yes to work that didn’t fit – businesses with little appetite for improving how they worked, or below a sensible minimum fee.

It stretched the team, and it didn’t serve those clients as well as it should have.

We’re clear now about who we’re built for: multi-site groups who want a finance function, not just a bookkeeping service. It’s a better business for it – and a better fit for the clients we work with.

From day one, the job was to understand how a client’s business actually works, not just record what happened in it. That’s still the standard today, even with a team of 35.

Someone at Virgate knows each client well enough to spot when something looks wrong before the client has to ask.

One client put it simply: they respond faster than our previous in-house team did, and they actually understand our business. That’s the difference between an accounts service and a finance function – and it’s the one thing that hasn’t changed in ten years.

Two moments stand out from the last decade.

The first is watching our own people grow. Several of our leaders started in junior roles and grew with the business – including our Managing Director, who joined as our second employee.

The second is watching the work travel. We’ve made enough of a difference to UK businesses that our services are now being sought after overseas too.

Ten years of getting the basics right. Clean data, documented processes, people who care. That’s what lets a finance function scale without losing what makes it good.

Because looking ahead, the mechanical work – posting, coding, reconciling, first-pass reviews – will be largely automated, and continuous rather than something done at month-end. The value is moving almost entirely to judgement: interpreting the numbers, challenging the business, and helping owners make better decisions faster. We’re putting our effort into exactly that – and it’s where we’ll be focused for the next ten years.