For controllers & CFOs at 10–200 person companies
This month, so far
And when it finally is — Thursday, probably, assuming the intercompany entry behaves and the inventory number stops moving — the report you hand over will describe a month that ended two weeks ago.
That’s the part nobody says out loud. It isn’t that the close is late. It’s that the business is being steered on numbers that were finished halfway through the following month, every month, and has been for years.
Show me a close that ends on the 3rd →
No call. No demo required. Keep reading — the price is on this page.
The bank feed lands on the 1st and it’s already wrong in two places. Somebody exports the AR aging and rebuilds it in a spreadsheet, because the report the system gives you doesn’t split the way the owner asks for it. There is a tab called FINAL_v4_USE_THIS. There is also a tab called FINAL_v4_USE_THIS (2), and one of them is the one everybody links to.
On the 6th the number in the books and the number on the warehouse floor have to be argued into agreement. On the 9th you are $2,417 out, and it takes a day and a half to find, and it turns out to be a vendor who changed their invoice numbering and got entered twice.
Somewhere in the middle of it, the owner puts his head round the door and asks how the month went. And the honest answer — the one you actually give — is “ask me Thursday.”
Then there’s the part that only you know. One person in the building understands why the March entries were made the way they were. Not a process. Not a document. A person. And every close leans on them a little harder than the last one.
You finish on the 16th. On the 17th, the next month starts feeding in. There is no version of this where you get ahead of it. The close ends, and the next one has already begun.
And you’ve already tried the obvious things
None of it worked, and it’s worth being precise about why — because the reason is not the one you’ve probably been given.
The actual reason
Your accounting system was built to do one honest job well: keep the books for one set of books. It is genuinely good at that job.
Everything else your business actually does — departments, locations, projects, jobs, stock, a second entity, a second currency, anything you need to see the P&L broken out by — lives outside it. In a spreadsheet. Maintained by a person.
Which is to say your month end currently runs through a set of hand-tied seams:
Every one of those is a place where a number leaves the system, gets handled by a human, and has to be carried back in. The system does not tie those seams. People do. By hand. Every month. Forever.
That is why hiring didn’t fix it — you added hands to a job that is made of hands. That is why the add-ons didn’t fix it — each one added a seam. And that is why the close takes two weeks and not two days: not because anybody is slow, but because the number of seams only ever goes up, and every single one of them has to be re-tied from scratch, in the same order, every month, before anyone is allowed to say what the month looked like.
The companies that close on the third are not better at closing. They have fewer seams.
What changes
Not fewer transactions. Not a bigger team. The same volume of work, with the joins made where the transaction is posted instead of two weeks later in a workbook.
How it goes now
Days 1–16
How it goes after
Days 1–3
None of that is exotic. It is simply what every business past a certain size runs on. And the reason you don’t have it is not that you’re too small.
It’s what it has always cost to get it.
Why you don’t already have it
The system described above is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central — Microsoft’s ERP for mid-sized businesses, and the thing a 40-person distributor is supposed to graduate onto when the spreadsheets stop coping.
Here is why they don’t. Clear Horizon Solutions — the Microsoft partner behind Footing, and the firm that has been doing these implementations for a living — states the traditional cost of getting onto it plainly, on their own site:
“A standard BC implementation runs three to six months and $40k–$150k in partner fees.”
— Clear Horizon Solutions Corp., published on footing.tech. That is their own figure for the traditional route, from the firm that does the work — not a third-party study, and I’m not going to dress it as one.
Read it again as a controller rather than as a buyer. Three to six months is two more year-ends of the close you already have. Forty thousand dollars is before anyone has told you what you’re getting, because the first line item is a discovery workshop that produces a document.
So the 40-person distributor stays on the spreadsheets. Not because the software doesn’t fit. Because the project to get onto it costs more than the software, and takes longer than anyone can hold their nerve for.
What this page is actually offering
Clear Horizon looked at what they were billing hourly for and found the honest answer: most of it is the same work every time.
Chart of accounts. Dimensions and posting groups. User roles and permission sets. Country, currency, tax and fiscal calendar. It is skilled work, it has to be right, and it is substantially identical from one wholesale distributor to the next — which is exactly the kind of work that should be built once and run, not discovered from scratch and billed by the hour.
So they automated the configuration and packaged the rest like software: a setup fee you can read before you commit to anything, a flat monthly subscription, and a Microsoft partner underneath it doing the parts that genuinely need a human. Same ERP. Same Microsoft licences, bought at Microsoft’s own list price. Days instead of quarters, and a published number instead of a proposal.
You are not buying a smaller version of Business Central. You are buying the same system without the six-figure runway in front of it.
What actually happens
This is Footing’s own published timeline, in their words, not an estimate of mine.
The bit everyone is actually afraid of
The reason people stay on a system they’ve outgrown is rarely the software. It’s the fear of standing in the middle of a live business with half its history in one place and half in another.
Migration is included in the setup, from any of these:
And what comes across:
One to three years of historical detail is quoted as an add-on rather than bundled — worth knowing up front, because that is the line most people assume is free and then discover isn’t. Day one should feel like a Monday, not like starting a company from scratch.
The price, on the page, where it belongs
You shouldn’t have to sit through a call to find out what something costs. There is a monthly and there is a setup fee. The monthly has exactly two things in it, and no others.
Inside the monthly
Setup is quoted alongside it, from $1,995, banded by how many full users you have. It is a one-time payment at the start — not a retainer, not a deposit against future hours, and not a line that comes back at renewal.
Footing’s own headline for the smallest configuration is $219/mo, setup from $1,995. Your seat count moves both of those, and the quote builder works it out in front of you in about ninety seconds — which is where I’d rather you got your exact figure than from me doing arithmetic on a sales page that might not match theirs.
Set that against the number Clear Horizon publishes for the traditional route — $40,000 to $150,000, three to six months — and you can see plainly what is being sold here. The same system. Without the project.
Before you fill anything in
Straight answers
Because most of those months are configuration — and configuration is the part that repeats. Footing automated the repeating part and kept a Microsoft partner on the parts that don’t. You are not getting a faster consultant. You are getting work that was already done.
Footing is built for 10 to 200. The honest test isn’t headcount, it’s seams: if your books need to be broken out by department, location, project or entity, and that breakout currently happens in a spreadsheet, you’re the size this is for. And you don’t outgrow it — the same platform runs businesses of a thousand-plus.
No. The quote builder gives you an itemised price without one, and you can go from there to checkout yourself. If you’d rather have someone walk you through it, that option is on the quote page too — and it carries your seat numbers into the conversation, so nobody starts by asking what you do.
Your accounts, customers, vendors, items, open AR and AP, opening balances and prior reconciliations migrate as part of the setup. Deeper historical detail — one to three years of transaction-level history — is a quoted add-on. Ask for it on the quote if your auditor will want it.
Clear Horizon Solutions Corp., a Microsoft partner specialising in Business Central. Footing is their productised onboarding: the same team, sold as a product instead of an engagement.
The initial term is twelve months, and after that you can cancel any time. The important part is what you keep: the Microsoft tenant is yours and so is the data, so leaving Footing means moving billing to your own Microsoft agreement — not migrating off a platform and starting over.
Six questions, about a minute
Tell us roughly how you’re set up and the next screen hands you the live quote builder — your seat count, your monthly, your setup fee, itemised. No card. No call. Nobody rings you to “understand your requirements.”
No card. No call. The quote builder is on the next screen.