How a marketing audit shortened the month-end closing time by 4 days
Numbers don't lie. In a logistics company from Rzeszów, the accounting department spent an average of 34 hours a month correcting errors in marketing invoices. We introduced audit procedures that shortened the month-end closing by 96 working hours.
Messy documents are a hidden cost
In March 2024, we entered Logis-Transport, which employs 142 drivers and has an extensive promotion department. The problem was repetitive: invoices for social media ads, graphic services, and events arrived late or with incorrect buyer data. Accounting had to manually verify 184 documents every month. The average processing time for one marketing invoice was 22 minutes, while fuel invoices were processed in 4 minutes. This generated bottlenecks that blocked bonus payments for office employees.
Analysis showed that 64% of errors resulted from a lack of clear guidelines for subcontractors. Advertising agencies issued invoices for the wrong tax IDs or confused VAT rates for foreign services. Orzeł Consulting Group analyzed 552 documents from the entire year 2023. We found 42 cases of double taxation of the same intangible services. Marketing is mathematics, and in this case, the result was negative for the company's financial liquidity. We started recovering capital by organizing the flow of information between the marketing and finance departments.
We applied a hard supplier verification method. Every contractor had to go through our tax questionnaire. We identified 12 entities that systematically sent documents that were not compliant with Polish tax law. Thanks to this, we eliminated the need to issue 87 correction notes every quarter. This was not a matter of aesthetics, but of real working hours of qualified accountants, whose hourly rate averaged PLN 115 net.
Order in marketing is not aesthetics. These are specific hours of accounting work that we turn into real financial savings.
The mechanism of closing the month in 7 days
Before our audit, the process of closing the books took until the 11th day of each month. The chief accountant, Ms. Grażyna from the Krakow branch, pointed out that they waste the most time waiting for settlements from Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns. There was a lack of internal invoices and proper recording of service imports. Orzeł Consulting Group introduced an automatic marketing cost reporting system that aggregates data by the 2nd day of the month. We shortened this stage by full 4 working days, which allowed the board to make decisions about fleet investments faster.
The model we introduced assumes that every expense over PLN 2,500 net must have a cost center code assigned at the order stage. Previously, 76% of marketing invoices went to the 'general bag', which required later allocation by 3 people. Since May 2024, this process has been 92% automated. Numbers don't lie: the time the finance department spent on marketing dropped from 34 hours to less than 5 hours a month. We recover capital not only from taxes, but from process efficiency.
Additionally, the audit revealed inconsistencies in accounting for barters with influencers. The company provided transport services worth PLN 45,600 in exchange for promotion, but tax documentation of this event did not exist. We fixed it in 14 days, avoiding a potential tax penalty of PLN 12,000. Hard tax data shows that unregulated marketing is a ticking time bomb for any financial director in a medium-sized company.
Recovering capital from incorrect VAT rates
During our work at Orzeł Consulting Group, we focus on facts. In the analyzed logistics company, we discovered that 14% of invoices for consulting services were recorded with a 23% VAT rate, even though the service was provided by an entity from the Czech Republic and should have been accounted for as an import of services with a reverse charge. This was an error that cost the company PLN 18,900 on an annual scale. After our intervention and correction of the declarations, the funds returned to the company's account within 28 days. This is money that was frozen in documentation due to human error.
Our experience with 482 projects since 2017 shows that marketing is the least controlled area in corporate budgets. Marketing directors often don't understand the difference between an invoice and a payment confirmation from a credit card. We taught the Logis-Transport team how to generate correct accounting documents from advertising systems. As a result, the number of undescribed transactions on bank statements dropped from 23 per month to zero in July 2024.
The final result of the audit is not just peace of mind at the tax office. It is also real knowledge about how much it costs to acquire one customer. With the mess in invoices, the previously calculated cost of PLN 42 per lead turned out to be an error – after organizing the financial data, the real cost was PLN 57. This PLN 15 difference at a scale of 1000 leads per month completely changes the company's growth strategy. Marketing is mathematics, and we provide an accurate calculator.
Marketing is mathematics. If your financial data is inaccurate, your business decisions are based on guessing, not facts.
Implementation of Orzeł Consulting Group standards
The recovery process lasted 6 weeks. We started with a full inventory of contracts with agencies. It turned out that 3 contracts were automatically extended, even though the agencies had not provided reports since September 2023. Terminating these contracts alone generated savings of PLN 8,400 per month. This is capital that the company lost due to a lack of operational supervision over marketing. Our role was to connect the dots between marketing, law, and accounting.
Every Orzeł Consulting Group client receives a cost approval matrix from us. It is a simple one-page A4 document that eliminates 90% of problems at the intersection of departments. We implemented it at Logis-Transport in June 2024. Since then, not a single marketing invoice has been questioned by the chief accountant. The effectiveness of our actions is confirmed by hard tax data: zero corrections in VAT-7 declarations for the last quarter.
For companies with turnover exceeding PLN 10 million per year, a marketing audit should be standard at least once every two years. Tax optimization is not just about looking for reliefs, but above all about eliminating process losses. In this case, the recovered time and money allowed the company to hire an additional forwarder, which directly translated into a 4% revenue increase in the third quarter. Numbers don't lie – order in papers is fuel for business.
