Caatalyst have been proud to support the Build Malawi and Expand charities as they have built and sustained a new primary school in the north of Malawi near the village of Chisala. The school is now able to offer an education to several hundred local children. To find out more and to see how you can support this project please go to http://www.buildmalawi.org/
We are looking to hire bright, personable individuals with a strong financial background as Auditors to help continue the sucess of the company.
Individuals with experience of our industry are welcome to apply however training will be provided as required. If you think you have what it takes to be a success in the challenging world of profit recovery please get in touch by email to info@caatalyst.co.uk
So many times I meet senior finance and procurement people who profess to want to save money. They understand the benefit of a programme like the Caatalyst Profit Recovery Audit. They talk about the pressures about the bottom-line and the imperative of getting value for money.
And then they do nothing. Our audit takes about 3 hours client time to kick off and returns around 0.1% of annual spend to the bottom line or £1million for every £1billion spent. An amazing return on time invested. So perhaps its politics getting in the way or simply inertia. Or maybe I didn’t wear enough deoderant, should have thought of that…
Cash is king they say, even more so in times of economic insecurity. So reconsider your possibly overpaid, hourly billing management consultants, change management specialists, integrated transformers, peer to peer benchmarkers and six-sigma blue sky thinkers.
Nothing wrong with getting clever people to help run your business, but shouldn’t they be on the Board of Directors rather than an inexperienced 26 year old Oxbridge grad with an expensive laptop and cutting edge phrases who travels First Class whilst dreaming up ways of increasing their monthly bill?
Now that the public sector gravy train has hit the buffers of economic reality, lots of these poor mites will be looking for someone new to latch onto. Watch out. Actually as it turns out when the NHS has no money to pay doctors and nurses, it still needs these guys to rearrange the deckchairs one last time before the whole thing goes down.
Why not save all that money then hire a firm (ahem, Caatalyst) who will actually bring money into your bank accounts within 4 weeks? And it costs you nothing. £1m recovered for every £1bn you spend and we take a share of the successful recoveries. Not only that, at the end of the audit you get a straightforward, practical best practices report to improve the running of your finance function. Simples.
We often say in our business that if we find you nothing then you pay us nothing; a risk free opportunity to add substantial sums to the company bottom-line.
However, I guess that the opposite holds true as well: if you pay us nothing then we will find you nothing. If the Client negotiates the profit recovery firm’s percentage fee down too low this can backfire on the project.
This is a risk/reward type business, so if there is not enough incentive then the audit firm may not be able to put sufficient resources to work and substantial recoveries can be missed. The Client may say that there are many easy recoveries to be made so the fee percentage should be very low. This may beg the question as to why the Client has not recovered these items themselves if they are so straightforward and don’t forget a lot of the audit work involves actually obtaining repayment of funds as well as identifying them in the first place.
In most cases the Client keeps substantially more than half of the money recovered so a reduction of a headline 5% on the recovery rate (e.g. from 30% to 25%) may in fact equate to 15% or 20% of the audit firm’s fee (which may represent most or all of their profit margin) and will quite likely lead to a fall in the overall net benefit to the client if, as is likely, a significant level of recoveries get missed and client service suffers.
So whilst it is of course important to get the best possible deal commensurate with a successful audit, it should be borne in mind that those few extra percent points reduction in the auditors fee could be a big chunk of their profit margin and may impact adversely on totals recovered and increase the temptation to cut corners. CW.
Our extensive experience in the airline and aviation sector has allowed us to develop a sector-specific Contracts Audit programme. We review your historic transactions to identify where you may have been charged too much by vendors compared to agreed contracts.
Some examples of some specific review areas:
Engineering C-Check levels Flying hours when applied to fee structures Cycles and age when applied to fee structures Projects – Upgrades, renewals and maintenance
Airport ServicesLanding fees, aircraft positioning and parking Ground and baggage handling charges Security
Cleaning and MaintenancePlane configurations when calculating charges for cleaning, maintenance and upgrades. Supplies and labour costs.
Catering On-board, crew and lounge charges
Fuel Agreed prices for period
Film and Entertainment On-board Media, Licence fees
Sales and Marketing Agents Commissions, project costing, Cabin Fulfilment, Events
IT Reservation systems, hardware and software. Supplies, maintenance and support services
Transportation, accommodation Crew costs, car hire, fleet and car hire, hotel costs
Over-flight Charges Check each country’s rate
Property and Facilities Rents, business rates, service charges, insurance and utilities Tenants billing Capital projects
Finance Finance Leasing, Insurance, Cap-ex Projects
Contact us for more details on how you can make the most of our airline sector experience.
