For owners & presidents of 10–200 person businesses
It took eleven days. Two people came off their actual jobs to do it. Somebody built a spreadsheet from scratch, because there wasn’t one.
And when you finally sent it, you weren’t confident the number was right. You were out of time.
You’ve probably filed that under a bad fortnight. It wasn’t a bad fortnight. It was a preview.
What it takes to answer in an afternoon →
No sales process. Nothing to book. The pricing is on this page, a little further down.
Roughly how it went, if it went like it usually goes:
Here is the part that matters. Nobody outside the business ever sees the eleven days. They see a PDF that turned up a little late and looked fine. Which is exactly why nothing changes afterwards — the cost was entirely yours, and it was invisible to the only person who could have made it a priority.
And it wasn’t a one-off
Past a certain point, people outside your business start needing to see inside it. Not because something is wrong — because you now matter enough to be checked.
The bank, before a renewal
Three years, consistently presented. A work-in-progress schedule if you build things. Covenant calculations they expect you to be able to reproduce on demand.
The insurer or the bonding company
They price your risk off numbers you supply. Slow and uncertain looks like risk, whether or not it is.
Your first real audit or review
Triggered by revenue, by a lender, or by taking on an investor. They will want to see not just the number but where it came from.
A large customer’s vendor onboarding
Increasingly wants stock by location, lot traceability, or evidence you have controls at all — before they put you on the approved list.
A buyer’s accountant
If you ever get serious about selling. This is the one where the eleven days doesn’t cost you a fortnight. It costs you multiple, because uncertainty gets priced in and it never gets priced in your favour.
Every one of those arrives on somebody else’s schedule, with a date attached. You don’t get to pick the month. And each of them asks a question that runs straight across the boundary between the places your information lives — which is precisely the question you cannot answer quickly.
Why it’s hard, specifically
Nothing was lost. Every invoice, every bill, every hour, every purchase order is written down somewhere. Your record-keeping isn’t the problem — you kept the records.
The problem is that they’re kept in four places that don’t share a vocabulary. The accounting file knows customers and invoices. The job sheet knows projects and costs. The stock list knows locations. And two or three people know the exceptions — why the March allocation was made that way, which jobs were restated, what that equipment charge is.
A question from outside almost always crosses all four. “Margin by project, by year, with work in progress” needs the accounting file and the job sheet and the exceptions, joined, consistently, for three years. There is no button for that. There is a person, a week, and a brand new spreadsheet.
And here is the bit that actually costs you: a number assembled by hand is a number you have to defend by hand. When the follow-up question comes — and it always comes, because one answer produces two more questions — you don’t adjust a filter. You do it again.
What changes
Not more discipline. Not a better spreadsheet. A different shape of system underneath, where the joins are recorded at the moment of the transaction rather than reconstructed three years later by somebody who has to guess.
Assembling it
Eleven days
Producing it
An afternoon
That difference has a name that nobody uses in conversation. It’s the difference between having your numbers and being able to produce them.
What that system is
The system on the right of that table is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Microsoft builds it for companies your size. Finance, sales, purchasing, inventory and project accounting in one place, sitting inside the Outlook and Excel your team already has open.
You may well have been quoted for it, or for something like it. And what you were quoted was not really software. It was a project: a discovery phase, a configuration phase, a training phase, a go-live, and a timeline measured in quarters. You looked at the calendar, looked at what the business was actually doing that year, and decided to look at it again later.
Then the same thing happened the following year, and you were right both times. A business your size cannot stop for a quarter to install a filing system, however good the filing system is.
You were never turning down the software. You were turning down the two quarters in front of it.
What’s actually being offered here
Footing is built by Clear Horizon Solutions Corp., a Microsoft partner that implements Business Central for a living. They looked at what they had been billing hourly for and admitted something most firms wouldn’t.
Most of it repeats. Chart of accounts. Dimensions and posting groups. User roles and permissions. Country, currency, tax and fiscal calendar. That work is skilled, and getting it wrong is expensive — and it is also close to identical from one contractor to the next. Work that repeats should be built once and run, not rediscovered and re-billed.
So they automated it and sold the result like software: a published setup fee, a published monthly, and the same Microsoft partner behind it for the parts that genuinely need judgement. Your Microsoft licences at Microsoft’s own list price, with nothing added on top.
Kickoff to running is ten to fourteen days. Not a shortened project. The configuration was already done.
The two weeks, in order
Footing publishes this timeline themselves. It is theirs, not my estimate of it.
If the question crosses more than one company
There’s the operating company and the one that holds the property. Or a second entity opened for a joint venture, a US or Canadian subsidiary, the one the equipment sits in, and the dormant one nobody has closed.
Day to day that’s fine. It becomes expensive the moment somebody outside asks for a consolidated figure — because consolidation is the single most common thing to be done once a year, by hand, in a workbook, and then defended line by line to somebody who does this professionally.
Footing prices multi-entity as published line items rather than as a conversation:
Multi-entity add-ons
Those are the quote builder’s own line items and its own figures. Which of them applies depends on how your entities actually relate to one another, and the quote itemises that rather than leaving you to guess — so I’m not going to tell you which one you’ll need.
Set up once, at the beginning. After that the consolidated view comes out of the system instead of out of a spreadsheet somebody rebuilds each January.
The objection everyone raises third
Almost nobody arrives clean. The migration is part of the setup fee, and it runs from QuickBooks Online and Desktop, Xero, Sage 50, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, FreshBooks, Wave, or plain Excel and CSV.
What travels with you:
Transaction-level history reaching back one to three years is priced separately rather than bundled — and if a lender or an auditor is the reason you’re reading this, that is the line to ask about on your quote, because it is the one that decides how far back you can answer questions from inside the system rather than from the old file.
Published, not proposed
A monthly, and a one-time setup fee. That’s the whole structure. Here is what sits inside the monthly:
The monthly
The setup fee starts at $1,995 and steps up with the number of full users. It is paid once, at the beginning, and it covers the configuration and the migration. Footing’s published starting point for the smallest configuration is $219 a month with setup from $1,995.
Your own figure depends on seats and entities, and their quote builder itemises it in about ninety seconds. I’d rather you got the number from them than from me — a figure I calculate on a sales page is a figure that can disagree with the one they actually charge you, and that is not a surprise anybody needs.
Read this before the form
Straight answers
Because the next request won’t be the same request. Each one asks for a different cut — by project, by location, by entity, as at a date — and every cut you can’t produce is another fortnight assembled by hand. Getting through it isn’t the same as being able to answer it, and the gap between those two only widens as you grow.
You’d be live in ten to fourteen days, and from that point forward the answers come out of the system. What you can answer about the past depends on how much historical detail you migrate, which is a line on your quote — worth deciding deliberately if a lender or an auditor is the reason you’re here.
That’s the normal shape of a Footing customer. The test isn’t whether you have a finance team — it’s whether questions from outside cross more than one of your systems. If your projects, your stock and your books live in different places, they do.
No. The licences are per user, not per entity, and the entities are priced as published add-ons — $895 for each additional one, with group and cross-entity setup and a bundle listed separately, up to ten entities. Put your real number into the quote builder and it shows you the effect rather than describing it.
No, and that is deliberate on their side rather than a favour. The builder itemises the price without anybody speaking to you, and checkout runs straight off it. A walkthrough is available from the same screen if you want one, and it starts with your numbers already in front of whoever takes it.
Twelve months to begin with, and after that you stop whenever you like. What doesn’t leave with us is the thing you actually came for: the tenant is registered in your name from day one, so cancelling changes who invoices you for Microsoft. It does not take back the ability to answer the next request.
Six questions, about a minute
Answer these and the next screen is the builder itself — where entities and seats are the two dials that actually move the number. Nothing to pay, nobody to speak to, and no one ringing you afterwards to qualify you.
No card, no call. You’re on the builder itself in one click.