Business Consultant

Quoted after a short discovery call, because consulting cost tracks scope and duration rather than a rate card. A focused diagnostic on one function — collections, procurement, a single plant's operations — is a few weeks of work. A full transformation programme with monthly reviews runs across quarters. In the Indian market both fixed-fee projects and monthly retainers are common, and we tell you which one fits before quoting. If the honest answer is that you need a competent bookkeeper or a better off-the-shelf ERP rather than a consultant, we say that instead of selling an engagement.

We follow the money and the paperwork. That means sitting with your team for a few days, walking one order from enquiry to payment received, checking the same numbers in three places — WhatsApp, Excel, Tally — and interviewing the people who work around the system rather than the ones who designed it. You get a written findings document: where cash is stuck, which steps add days without adding value, what data is entered twice, and which reports are simply wrong. Each finding carries an owner, an estimated cost of doing nothing, and a fix.

Udyam registration is free, done online with PAN and Aadhaar, and takes minutes, so there is little reason not to have it. What it opens up is priority sector lending, collateral-free credit schemes, tender and fee exemptions, subsidy programmes, and the MSMED Act protection on delayed payments from buyers, enforceable through the Samadhaan portal. The investment and turnover limits that decide micro, small or medium classification were revised recently, so confirm the current slab before assuming your category. Registration on its own is not a strategy; using it to access cheaper credit is.

It is a fair conflict to raise, so raise it. Convertrix builds software, which gives us an obvious incentive to recommend building. The practical answer: the diagnostic is scoped, billed and delivered separately from any build, the roadmap names off-the-shelf options where they fit, and we state plainly when a process change or a hire beats new software. You are free to take the roadmap to another developer, and some clients do. If a recommendation ever looks like it exists to create work for us, ask us to justify it in writing.

The first measurable changes usually land inside a quarter, because early phases are deliberately the cheap ones — tightening collection follow-up, removing duplicate data entry, correcting a pricing error. Structural work like an ERP rollout or a new reporting line shows up over two to four quarters. We agree the metrics before starting: days sales outstanding, order-to-dispatch time, gross margin by product, hours spent on monthly closing. Those are reviewed monthly against a baseline captured during the audit, so improvement is measured against a recorded number rather than against memory.