Numbers that survive diligence
Finance and operations clarity.
For the people running the business, and the people buying it.
Brightmere joins what your operation does to what your finance records, transaction by transaction, so the numbers you run a £5-50m business on are the same numbers that survive diligence. For owners and finance leaders. And for whoever is about to buy, back or lend to them.
Three named services. Fixed fees, published below. Every finding sized in pounds and traced to your own data.
When people call us
Someone is about to go through your numbers with a hostile eye, or you are about to rely on someone else's. That is the moment.
Built for operationally complex businesses
Hundreds or thousands of SKUs, customers, jobs, loads or transactions - more than anyone can track by hand, where the average hides the answer and the money is buried in the detail. Owner-led or PE-backed. Whichever side of the deal you're on.
Your operations and your finances don't speak the same language
Finance is really just a translation of operations. The real world happens - stock ships, a customer takes 90 days, a job runs long - and only weeks later does it surface as a number, blended into an average that buries where the money actually went. That lag, and that averaging, is where the money and the clarity hide.
Two systems, two truths
Sales counts it one way, operations runs it another, finance books a third. Same business, three numbers - and the difference falls on the floor between them.
Answers arrive too late
By the time a problem reaches the P&L, the cash has already moved and the decision has already been made on an average. You're always explaining the past.
We make them one
We join operations and finance into a single view where every event carries its money - so the numbers agree, tie to source, and finally answer the questions you actually have.
Records what happened
- Works from the ledger: statutory accounts, management accounts, tax. Correctly.
- Never opens the order book, the job sheets, the TMS or the ERP
- Sees one or two transactions a year, so doesn't know what the other side's diligence pulls
- Prepared the numbers, so their reassurance carries little weight with a buyer or lender
- Still essential: the statutory sign-off and the chartered report a lender insists on
Tests whether it holds up
- Works from the transactions and ties them to the ledger - the part most firms can't do
- Answers the diligence questions: concentration, real margin, working capital, run-rate
- A second pair of eyes before the hostile pair arrives, with the fixes sized
- Numbers you can steer by, and defend in front of a board, a lender or a buyer
- Sits before or beside the chartered firm. Never instead of it, and never called QoE
The method
One business, three lenses
We read the same business three ways - and each lens is run at a resolution a spreadsheet can't reach: on your actual data, line by line, not category averages.
Lens 1
Financial clarity
Are the numbers real, and where's the money? Unit economics, working capital, margin durability and cash - the profit machine, read line by line.
The first thing diligence-ready numbers runs.
Lens 2
Operational clarity
Can the operation actually deliver the plan? Capacity, the one true bottleneck, and where it breaks under load - read from the operational log, not a site visit.
The question growth is really asking.
Lens 3
Leadership clarity
How much of the business depends on you, or a handful of key people? Founder and key-person dependency, measured from what the systems reveal - not the org chart.
What walks out the door if they do.
Read the plan like a finance person, name the constraint like an operator, compute it like a data scientist. That bridge is the whole point.
What we do
Three services. One skill. Prices on the page.
The same work, checking whether the numbers hold up at transaction level, sold at the three moments it matters: before someone looks at yours, before you rely on someone else's, and every month after.
Diligence-ready numbers
3 weeks · £10,000 fixed
Owners of £5-50m businesses about to raise, sell, refinance or take on a new facility.
We rebuild the picture from your own transactions, not the trial balance: cash proof, real margin by customer and product, working capital stripped of the flattering month, revenue concentration, and every heroic assumption named out loud. You get a findings pack a lender's or buyer's team can test, and the answers before they ask the questions.
Operator diligence for buyers
2-3 weeks · £15,000 fixed
Acquirers, searchers and holding companies buying a £3-20m business, and the advisers and lenders backing them.
The same transaction-level read, pointed at the target: is the revenue what the data room says, which customers and jobs actually make money, how much cash the business really needs, and whether the operation can deliver the plan you are paying for. Runs alongside the chartered firm's financial due diligence and answers what it does not.
Numbers kept true
Monthly · From £1,500 a month
Owners and finance leads who want the picture to stay reconciled after the event, month after month.
The rebuilt view stays live: reconciled every month with anything that does not tie flagged, real margin and cash watched at line level, a rolling 13-week cash view, and one session a month on the numbers and the decisions in front of you. No day rates, no open-ended scope.
Not sure which one? Say what's coming up on the call and we'll tell you, including if the honest answer is “none of them yet”.
Who you'd be working with
Lu Luo, founder
I trained in accounting and economics and started out in accounting and corporate finance. Then I moved into data science and engineering, and spent years building the systems that finance teams report from. That mix is rare: most people who can build the system can't read a P&L, and most who can read the P&L can't build the system. I do both, and Brightmere is me doing it for you.
The job I keep being asked to do is the same one. Someone is about to put a business's numbers in front of people with money, and wants to know what those people will find before they find it. At a fast-growing B2B commerce platform preparing for investment, the growth story was strong: sales up quarter after quarter. Nobody had run the cohorts. When I did, the customers behind that growth were mostly new ones, and most of them didn't come back. The headline was true. The business underneath it was different, and leadership needed to know that before the investors' analysts told them. The same gap, between what the numbers say and what the transactions show, is in almost every business I open.
That is what I built Brightmere to do: hand owners numbers they can run the business on, and defend in front of a board, a lender or a buyer. I work from London, with clients in the UK and the US, and I do the work myself.
Where this started
Does your board pack know what your order book knows?
A fast-growing business preparing for investment, a top line everyone trusted, and the cohorts nobody had run. Same company, two records, one of them right. It is why Brightmere joins operations to finance at the transaction.
Read the story →Accounting Brain. Data-Science Hands.
Most data consultants can build the model but can't read the P&L. Most accountants can read the P&L but can't build the model. We do both - which is why we know where to look and how to actually go and get it.
We Speak Both Languages
A finance and accounting background, plus the engineering to build the system. We read the P&L and the operation, and translate cleanly between them - which is the whole job.
We Work at Line Level
Excel chokes around a million rows. Your business has tens of millions of transaction lines once you join stock, sales, returns, and terms. We work where the cash actually is.
Every Finding Sized in Pounds
Not “your inventory is high.” We tell you how much cash is trapped, in which lines, and what it's worth to free it. If we can't find it, we say so.
Three Weeks, Not Three Months
Deals run on a clock. A sharp answer before the other side asks beats a perfect answer delivered after the price has moved.
Fixed fees, agreed before we start
No day rates and no meter running. The fee is on the page, every finding carries a pound figure you can weigh it against, and if the first look says the prize is small, we say so and stop.
How we price, in full →Questions We Get Asked
Why wouldn't I just ask my accountant?
Because this isn't their job, and most will say so. Your accountant works from the ledger and records what happened, correctly. A buyer's or lender's team works from the transactions and asks whether the business is what you say it is: how concentrated the revenue is, which customers and products really make money, whether the working capital is normal or flattered. Answering that means joining the order book, the job sheets and the bank to the accounts, line by line. That's engineering as much as accounting, and it's the part most firms can't do. We do it before the other side does.
Is this a quality of earnings report?
No, and we won't call it one. A QoE is a chartered firm's validation of your earnings, and a lender or buyer may still insist on one. What we produce sits before it or alongside it: the transaction-level read that tells you what that report will find, with time to fix it. If you need a QoE, we'll say so and point you to a firm.
Isn't a strong fractional CFO already doing this?
For ongoing finance leadership, often yes, and we're not a replacement for that relationship. But when the answer lives below the averages - which 20 customers drove last quarter's margin move, including freight, returns and the cost of slow payment - most fractional CFOs hit a tooling wall. We're the answer engine for the moments the question gets too granular for a spreadsheet, and we're happy to work alongside yours.
What if our data is a mess?
Most is. The first few days of every engagement map what's actually usable before we commit to the findings. You'd be surprised: basic finance, sales and operational exports usually carry more than enough signal. We work with what you have, not what you wish you had.
Do you replace our ERP or BI tools?
No. We plug into whatever you're running - Sage, NetSuite, Xero, QuickBooks, your warehouse system - and read it. We make your existing investment more valuable; we don't rip it out.
How do you handle sensitive financial data?
Data stays in your environment - we work via secure, read-only access, not data transfers. Happy to walk through our security posture on a call before anything is connected.
Let's See If We're a Fit
30-minute call. No pitch deck. Tell us what's coming - a raise, a sale, a refinance, a deal - and we'll tell you honestly whether your numbers need the work.