Building the finance function a strategic investor expected to find

DAC.Digital had grown the way good engineering groups grow — quietly, on the back of repeat work for clients like Philips, Thales, AVL, Bosch, and ABB. Around 150 engineers, 8M EUR in annual revenue, fourteen years of compounded delivery. The finance function had carried the company that far. It wasn't going to carry it any further.

The COO and co-founder, Damian, had been running it largely on his own — reconciling project utilization, revenue recognition, and cost allocation across a stack of spreadsheets in his head and on his screen. The team had grown. The clients had grown. The reporting hadn't. Month-end close was finishing past the 20th of the following month. There was no real-time view mid-month. Every number traced back to one person knowing where it came from.

Then Infomotion Group came on board as a strategic investor. That changed what reporting needed to look like and how fast it needed to land. Investor-grade reporting isn't a higher polish on the same output — it's a different architecture. The conversation Damian needed to have wasn't "let's clean up the spreadsheets." It was: build the finance function the company should have already had.

It's a pattern we see across founder-led groups that grow past 30M of revenue in their local currency: the finance function was sized for the founder, not for the investors or the next CFO. A strategic investor entry is usually the trigger that forces it.

• Financial data spread across six Excel files, reconciled by hand each month
• Project profitability calculated separately from financial results — no single view of chargeability
• Time tracking (Primetric) lived in systems disconnected from accounting
• Month-end close finishing past the 20th of the following month — investor-incompatible
• One-person dependency — if the COO stepped away, the data flow broke
• Infomotion Group expecting investor-grade reporting, not exports of internal spreadsheets

Month 1 — Diagnostic and architecture

‍We mapped how data flowed through Saldeo, Primetric, and the accounting system. Found the breakpoints. Defined a target architecture that would consolidate all three sources into a single management dashboard. Aligned on what "investor-grade" needed to mean for Infomotion specifically — and what reporting cadence and depth that translated into.

Month 2 — Process redesign

‍Rebuilt the chart of accounts to support project- and segment-level reporting. Designed automated data flows from operational systems into the reporting layer. Worked directly with the external accounting partner to align bookings with the new analytical structure — so we weren't adding a layer on top, we were fixing it at source. The accounting partner had to come with us; otherwise the architecture would be a translation exercise every month.

Month 3 & 4 — Dashboard rollout & investor reporting

‍Deployed the PowerBI management dashboard combining financial metrics with operational KPIs: chargeability, project margins, utilization. Structured the monthly close process. Trained the internal team. The system stopped depending on a single person knowing where everything was.

• Unified PowerBI dashboard integrating Saldeo, Primetric, and accounting data
• Restructured chart of accounts supporting project- and segment-level analytics
• Monthly close process — no longer dependent on any single person
• Automated chargeability and project margin reporting
• Investor reporting pack delivered on schedule each month

DAC.Digital now runs on a controlling layer that scales with the business instead of trailing behind it. Month-end lands on time. The COO has his hours back. Infomotion Group sees clean numbers in a format they recognize — without anyone in Gdańsk having to translate.

The headline here is investor readiness, but the underlying lesson is structural. Founder-led groups in the 8–20M EUR revenue band almost always discover, at the moment of a strategic investor entry or a Series B, that the finance function never got the upgrade the rest of the business did. That gap is what we build to close — ideally before the cap table changes, but always before the next reporting cycle the new investor sees.