Chartered cost assurance · Construction
Twenty years of systems,
and a Big Four acquisition at the end of them.
A chartered practice auditing cost on major open-book construction contracts, where the numbers being checked are large and the client is usually the party paying them. Acquired by Deloitte UK after more than twenty years.
Relationship
Sector
Contracts
Outcome
The problem
Auditing other people's numbers is a data problem
Open-book cost assurance is a specific and demanding discipline. A contractor's costs on a major project are laid open for inspection, and the practice's job is to establish what was actually and properly incurred — which means handling large volumes of other organisations' financial data, in whatever shape those organisations keep it, and arriving at a defensible number.
Two things follow from that, and they shape every system involved. The first is that the data is not yours and not consistent: every contract arrives with its own structure, its own conventions and its own gaps, and the practice cannot dictate terms to a client's accounting department. The second is that the output has to survive challenge. A finding may be disputed by a party with a great deal of money at stake and good lawyers, so the working has to be traceable back to source years after the fact.
Over twenty years that produces a body of systems with unusual requirements: flexible enough to absorb whatever arrives, rigorous enough that nothing is lost, and stable enough that a piece of work done in 2012 can still be evidenced. Very little off-the-shelf software is built for that combination, because the market for it is small and the requirements are strict.
What we built
Systems built for evidence, not for tidiness
Two decades of continuous work rather than one project — the systems grew as the practice did.
Handling data we did not shape
Contract data arriving in whatever form the contractor keeps it, ingested without forcing the practice to renegotiate how a third party does its accounting.
An auditable trail
Every figure traceable back to what it came from. In a discipline where findings are challenged, the working is as important as the answer.
Built to last a contract's life
Major construction contracts run for years and are queried for years afterwards. The systems had to still be there, and still be readable, long after the project closed.
Growing with the practice
Twenty years of change absorbed incrementally rather than through periodic rip-and-replace projects that would have interrupted live engagements.
Surviving due diligence
An acquisition by a Big Four firm involves a serious look at what the target actually runs on. The systems were part of what was bought.
A single point of contact
The same person across twenty years. In a specialist practice, an adviser who already understands the discipline is worth more than a larger team who do not.
Where it got to
Bought by Deloitte
The Orange Partnership was acquired by Deloitte UK after more than twenty years of operation. That is not a claim we are making about our own work — it is a fact about the client, and the honest reading is that they built a substantial practice and we supported the systems underneath it for most of its life.
But it is worth stating for one specific reason. A Big Four acquisition involves due diligence, and due diligence looks at what a business actually runs on. Systems that are undocumented, fragile or dependent on a single supplier's goodwill are a finding in that process. These were not.
For a prospective client, the useful signal is the duration rather than the exit. Twenty years is long enough that every kind of thing that can go wrong has had a chance to, and long enough that a supplier who was not delivering would have been replaced several times over.
What it runs on
Long-lived business systems handling third-party financial data, built for traceability and retention across contract lifetimes measured in years.
A specialist practice
with no software written for it?
That is usually the position when the discipline is narrow and demanding. Tell us what you actually do and we will tell you whether it is a build or whether something off the shelf would do.