The management layer your ERP was never designed to be.
One live, traceable view of your group. Consolidation that eliminates intercompany honestly, a 13-week cash forecast that shows its evidence, and month-end as a daily queue instead of a crisis. Installed in weeks. Your team's effort is one export a week.
30 minutes · live demo estate · no slides
The spreadsheet nobody talks about.
Every group that grows past one entity discovers the same thing. The ERP that ran the business cannot see the group.
So someone in finance builds the missing layer by hand. A consolidation workbook. A cash tab. A reconciliation file with seventeen versions. It takes days every month, it breaks when the person who built it is on holiday, and nobody can say which numbers rest on documents and which rest on hope.
That workbook is the real management system of most mid-market groups. Your board pack is built on it. Your bank's 13-week forecast lives in it. And it is slow, fragile and unaudited.
You do not need a new ERP. You need the layer the ERP was never designed to provide.
An installed management layer, not another tool.
Backbone sits underneath the systems you already run. Sage stays. Xero stays. Your team keeps working exactly as they do today.
We take the exports your systems already produce, map them into one canonical schema, score the data quality honestly, and switch on the lenses your leadership team has been asking for. We install it. We operate it. You read it.
That is what we mean by the ManagementOS. Not accounting software. Not a dashboard over unreconciled data. A management layer, deployed against your real estate, live in weeks.
No rip-and-replace.
Your source systems are never touched.
No IT project.
Files, not API keys. Your FC produces the export pack in an afternoon.
No black box.
Every figure traces to a source record and carries its evidence basis.
What the leadership team gets.
See the group as a group.
Consolidated P&L across every entity, every system, every currency. Intercompany eliminated only where both sides match; anything unmatched stays visible as an exception instead of being silently netted off. Drill from any consolidated line to the source invoices.
| Entity | Revenue | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Midlands Distribution | €3.4m | transactional |
| Trade Counters | €1.6m | transactional |
| Distribution UK | £0.6m | transactional |
| Group Holdings | €0.2m | statement |
| IC eliminated | −€728k | matched only |
| Week | Closing cash | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| W+1 | €1.49m | transactional |
| W+4 | €1.31m | transactional |
| W+8 | €0.96m | mixed |
| W+13 | €1.12m | manual adj. |
Cash you can trust 13 weeks out.
A rolling forecast built on your actual AR and AP ageing, with named scenarios and audited adjustments. Every line tagged with its evidence basis, so you know how much of your cash position rests on hard data and how much on assumptions. And it remembers: every version is saved, compared, and graded against what the bank actually did.
Month-end becomes a daily queue.
Reconciliation stops being a two-day event. Intercompany, bank, discounts, ledger-versus-ledger: breaks surface as exceptions in a workspace with a full audit trail, and the queue trends to zero across the month. The Monday morning "how are we looking?" call, answered before anyone asks.
| Break | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| IC order 4417 vs AP | value break | investigating |
| Bank line 30 May | unmatched | open |
| Settlement disc. 2.5% | value break | resolved |
| Stock SKU B-1188 | quantity break | resolved |
You: Which deals are killing margin this quarter?
Twelve deals sit below the 10% target. The largest gap is the Bracken Hardware Group: base margin 18.2%, but settlement discount and transport overlays bring it to 6.3% net…
Answers, not exports.
Ask the Backbone a question in plain English. Which deals are killing margin this quarter? How exposed are we to our biggest customer group? It reads the same reconciled schema the reports are built from, so it can only tell you what your data says. Grounded answers with names and numbers, not summaries.
Built for groups, not single companies.
Backbone is built for groups of two to ten entities, roughly €5m to €50m combined, running a mixed estate: some entities on Sage, some on Xero, at least one that only produces monthly accounts. A finance team of one to four, with a controller or FD doing consolidation by hand every month.
If that is your world, you already know the symptoms. An acquisition landed and brought a second chart of accounts with it. The bank asked for a 13-week cash view. A number reached the board that nobody could fully defend. Or an ERP replacement quote arrived, and the room went quiet.
This morning's truth.
Numbers you can defend.
Your week back.
Live in weeks, not quarters.
The export pack
We send a one-page checklist. Whoever runs your month-end produces the files in an afternoon: trial balance, aged debtors and creditors, invoice lines, bank statements. Files, not access.
The honest picture
We map your exports to the canonical schema, run the first ingest, and read back what we found: duplicate records, unallocated payments, intercompany that does not net off. Every gap is a finding, and the readback is your first deliverable.
The lenses come alive
Working sessions with your FC on meaning, not columns. Cash and debtors first, consolidation once the chart-of-accounts mapping is agreed, margin once the costs are trustworthy. Nothing pretends to more evidence than it has.
One export a week
Your team sends fresh files. We run the pipeline. Your leadership team opens a private URL and reads this morning's truth.
A management layer does not need real-time. It needs this morning.
Straight answers.
Do we have to replace anything?
No. Backbone sits underneath your existing systems. Sage stays, Xero stays, your team's workflow stays. That is the point.
Where does our data live?
Your estate runs in an EU region under a data processing agreement, or on your own infrastructure if you prefer. The public demo runs on shared cloud because the data is synthetic.
Is this AI?
The intelligence layer uses a language model to narrate and answer questions, and it is grounded: it reads the same reconciled schema the reports are built from, so it can only describe what your data says. Everything else is deterministic accounting logic you can trace line by line.
What does it cost?
A fixed deployment engagement, then a monthly operate fee. The deployment includes the data-quality readback, which most clients consider a diagnostic worth having on its own. We will give you exact numbers on the walkthrough once we know your entity count.
What if we stop?
You keep everything. Your source systems were never touched, and every export, mapping and report is yours. Backbone is a layer, not a lock-in.
How much of our team's time does it take?
One export a week, produced with a checklist in under an hour once the first pack is done. What your FC gets back is the six to ten hours a week currently lost to reconciliation and consolidation assembly.
30 minutes, seven lenses, one question.
The fastest way to understand Backbone is to watch it work. We run a walkthrough on the Midlands Group, a synthetic four-entity estate with three source systems, two currencies, and all the mess of a real business: intercompany breaks, unmatched bank lines, deals that look profitable until the overlays land.
Then one question: which of these would save the most time in your business this quarter?
Prefer to explore alone?
Walk the Midlands Group yourself. We'll send you access to the live demo estate; click through the consolidation toggle, run the forecast, open the reconciliation queue.
Your ERP runs the business. Backbone lets you see it.