Five years ago we launched a new product. A rental service.
The business model was simple. We rented equipment in bulk from a supplier at attractive wholesale rates, then rented it out to our customers individually. We had a healthy 100% margin on the equipment alone, plus additional revenue from installation, support and other services.
It was a good product. Customers liked it. Sales were growing. Profitable from day one.
Five years later we had hundreds of units out in the field, a steady stream of recurring revenue and a business line we were genuinely proud of.
Then we hired a new CFO.
A few weeks into the job, he came to my office with uncomfortable news.
“We’re losing a significant amount of money on these rentals every year.”
I was more than surprised. We were making lots of money here.
How could that be? We had negotiated excellent supplier rates. Our selling prices hadn’t changed. The business was growing, and our financial reports showed a healthy margin.
I asked him to explain.
He had noticed that the overall profitability was lower than it should have been, given our pricing model and the number of units deployed. But the accounting records themselves looked perfectly fine.
So we started investigating.
Everything was correct. Except the business.
Our supplier invoices were correct. Every month Supplier charged us for the equipment we were renting.
Our accounting department processed those invoices and paid them on time.
Our billing system was also working correctly. Every month it generated customer invoices according to the active rental agreements registered in the system.
Customers paid their bills. Finance reconciled the payments. There were no unexplained discrepancies.
We checked the usual suspects: incorrect supplier pricing, discounts, unpaid customer invoices, unexpected costs.
Nothing significant.
And yet, our CFO insisted that the numbers didn’t add up.
Eventually, we did something that sounds obvious in hindsight.
Instead of comparing invoices against payments, we compared the complete list of equipment we were paying for against the complete list of equipment we were billing to customers.
And there it was.
Some equipment had been delivered, activated and used by customers for months. We had been paying our supplier for it every month.
But the corresponding customer rentals had never been created in the billing system.
No rental record. No recurring charge. No invoice.
Some had been missed during initial activation. Others had slipped through during changes, replacements or customer migrations.
Nobody had deliberately done anything wrong. Each department had completed the tasks visible in its own system.
But nobody had checked whether every active rental was actually generating revenue.
Why didn’t we notice?
The most interesting part wasn’t that we had forgotten to bill some equipment.
It was that our healthy margins had hidden the problem.
Suppose we paid €100 per unit and charged our customers €200.
Nine correctly billed units would generate €900 in gross profit. One forgotten unit would cost us €100 without generating a cent of revenue.
Across those ten units, the business would still show €800 in gross profit.
It would still look profitable.
The more successful the product became, the easier it was for the missing charges to disappear into the overall numbers.
Our accountants weren’t making mistakes. They were reconciling actual invoices against actual payments.
But how do you reconcile an invoice that was never created?
You can’t.
The missing connection
We eventually understood that the problem wasn’t in accounting, billing or procurement.
It was between them.
Our supplier knew which equipment we were paying for.
Our operational system knew which equipment was active and assigned to customers.
Our billing system knew which rentals were being invoiced.
But none of these systems was responsible for answering one simple question:
“Are we billing every customer for every unit we’re paying for?”
That question crossed departmental and software boundaries.
And it had remained unanswered for two years.
How INTERA approaches the problem
This is exactly the type of operational blind spot we designed INTERA to detect.
INTERA doesn’t replace the accounting, billing or operational systems. It connects to them, reads their data and checks whether the business process makes sense as a whole.
For this particular case, the logic is remarkably simple:
- Supplier records: Which units are we paying for?
- Operational records: Which units are active, and who is using them?
- Billing records: Which units are generating customer charges?
- Reconciliation: Which active, supplier-billed units have no matching customer billing?
An unmatched unit becomes an exception requiring investigation.
Finance can see how many units are affected, their estimated monthly cost and potential missing revenue, and how long the discrepancies have existed.
Instead of discovering the problem two years later, a CFO could identify the exception during the first billing cycle and follow it until it is resolved.
No artificial intelligence is required to guess what happened. No new ERP system is needed.
Just a consistent check across systems that were never designed to check each other.
The lesson
I originally thought that a profitable product, reliable accounting and a good billing system were enough to keep this business under control.
Every system was doing its job. Every department had its procedures. Every invoice that existed was accounted for.
The losses were hiding in the transactions that should have existed, but didn’t.
That experience changed the way I think about business visibility. A healthy financial report doesn’t necessarily mean every underlying business process is healthy.