Watch the profit appear in your own books.
A forensic scan that reads every transaction from the last two years to show you how the business is actually built, where the profit leaks, and what to change to keep more of it.
Built for businesses with at least 24 months of clean books on a connected accounting system.
// Reviewed, signed, and walked through by a practicing CFO or forensic accountant
Total recoverable profit
$0
Owners pay consultants $15,000–$50,000 and wait weeks to be told what to change. Profit Protection delivers it in days, for $3,000, with a practicing CFO who tells you what to fix and where to grow.
You're not losing profit because you run a bad business.
You’re losing it because no one has looked at every transaction. Consultants read summaries. Accountants read summaries. Dashboards read summaries. Profit Protection reads every transaction from the last two years, which is where the leaks hide.
Pricing drift: cost rose, the price didn't
Customers that lose money on every job
Vendor inflation: same item, rising price
Collection delays tying up cash
Margin drift across products and time
The Monitor watches; Profit Protection goes looking.
Helcyon Profit Protection is a forensic read of two years of transactions, not a project. It focuses on margin, pricing, customers, vendors, and cash conversion.
Helcyon Monitor
Watches the vital signs
Continuous, automated, and steady. It warns you the moment a number starts to deteriorate.
Profit Protection
Takes the whole business apart
A one-time deep scan that peels the business apart layer by layer until the hidden leaks show.
Every transaction, read. The few that cost you, caught.
The scan does not sample, and it does not interview. It reads every transaction in the books, across two years, looking for the patterns that quietly drain profit. Most of what it reads is healthy. The point is the handful that are not, and what to do about each one.
0
Transactions read
24
Months covered
0
Findings flagged
TXN-48217
Brightwater Provisions · invoice paid
TXN-48219
Card settlement · batch 0934
TXN-48224
Pricing drift · cost rose 9%, price held flat
TXN-48231
Payroll run · biweekly
TXN-48238
Vendor payment · Stellar Supply
TXN-48243
Refund · order 11827
TXN-48246
Unprofitable account · Customer #417, -14% margin
TXN-48251
Deposit · ACH transfer
TXN-48259
Subscription · software
TXN-48267
Vendor inflation · same item, +18% over 12 mo
TXN-48273
Invoice issued · net 30
TXN-48280
Card settlement · batch 0935
TXN-48288
Slow collection · 84 days outstanding
TXN-48295
Vendor payment · Northwind
TXN-48301
Payroll tax · remittance
TXN-48309
Margin drift · mix shifted to low-margin line
TXN-48316
Deposit · customer prepay
TXN-48322
Invoice paid · Cedar Ridge
TXN-48337
Card settlement · batch 0936
TXN-48344
Vendor payment · Atlas Freight
TXN-48217
Brightwater Provisions · invoice paid
TXN-48219
Card settlement · batch 0934
TXN-48224
Pricing drift · cost rose 9%, price held flat
TXN-48231
Payroll run · biweekly
TXN-48238
Vendor payment · Stellar Supply
TXN-48243
Refund · order 11827
TXN-48246
Unprofitable account · Customer #417, -14% margin
TXN-48251
Deposit · ACH transfer
TXN-48259
Subscription · software
TXN-48267
Vendor inflation · same item, +18% over 12 mo
TXN-48273
Invoice issued · net 30
TXN-48280
Card settlement · batch 0935
TXN-48288
Slow collection · 84 days outstanding
TXN-48295
Vendor payment · Northwind
TXN-48301
Payroll tax · remittance
TXN-48309
Margin drift · mix shifted to low-margin line
TXN-48316
Deposit · customer prepay
TXN-48322
Invoice paid · Cedar Ridge
TXN-48337
Card settlement · batch 0936
TXN-48344
Vendor payment · Atlas Freight
// Illustrative. Counts and findings shown are demonstrative until your own scan runs.
We don't just find the leaks. We map how the business is built.
Most owners have never seen the shape of their own company: where the revenue concentrates, what each customer really costs to serve, why the margin moved. The scan reconstructs it from the transactions, so the picture is the business as it actually ran, not as the P&L summarized it.
Revenue structure
How concentrated you are in your top few customers, how much revenue actually recurs, and which accounts are quietly shrinking before it shows up in the total.
Customer economics
What each customer truly costs to serve once payment timing, order pattern, and discounts are loaded in. Often the biggest account by revenue is among the least profitable.
Product & mix
Where margin eroded because the sales mix shifted toward cheaper lines, even when every product held its own margin, plus the long tail of items that add work without profit.
Pricing realization
The gap between list price and what you actually collect, the same item sold at very different prices across customers, and the products where you have untapped room to raise.
Cost structure
How much of the cost base is fixed versus variable, where overhead crept up faster than revenue, and where buying the same thing from too many vendors cost you leverage.
Cash conversion
How long a dollar stays tied up from the day you pay to the day you collect, and which customers are financing themselves with your cash.
Two questions every owner carries: am I slipping, and am I overpaying?
The scan answers both from real data. It measures the business against the best version of itself, and against the market everywhere the numbers are solid enough to stand behind.
Against your own best year
Gross margin
Overhead, share of revenue
Marketing, share of revenue
Cash conversion
// Your own ledger, two years of it. You have run this business tighter than you are running it today, and the gap is the opportunity.
Against the market
Card processing
+$29,000per year over market
// The one external benchmark we can prove line by line, because interchange is public and the founder spent a career inside it.
A short report that opens with the money.
An output, not a process: the findings ranked by what they're worth, each one verified and signed.
CLIENT ANONYMIZED · 24-MONTH SCAN
Transactions read
214,880
Findings surfaced
83
Recoverable profit
$486,000
01
Pricing leakage
$172,000
02
Slow collections tying up cash
$134,000
03
Unprofitable major customer
$96,000
04
Vendor price inflation
$84,000
A P&L shows what already happened. This shows what to change, and where to grow.
A good profitability consultant doesn't hand you a P&L with the losses circled and walk out. They tell you what you've been undercharging for, which customers to keep or reprice, which costs and vendors to renegotiate first, then how to put the business on footing where the profit holds and the parts already working can grow.
A P&L or dashboard
Tells you what already happened: where the numbers landed, and where you're losing money now. Useful, but it stops at the diagnosis and leaves the decisions to you.
Profit Protection
The engine does the digging first, across every transaction, before anyone bills an hour. So the practicing CFO spends their time only on what you’re paying for: what to change, in what order, how to structure pricing, costs, customers, and cash so the business holds more profit, and where to put your effort to grow the parts the numbers already prove are working.
A person decides what actually matters.
The engine surfaces everything in the data, and then a practicing CFO, CEO, or forensic accountant decides what's real, what matters, and what to do about it, and tells you directly.
0
Findings surfaced by the engine
0
Survive expert review
0
You're told to act on
01
Validate
Every finding is tested against the reality only you can explain: the reason behind the number.
02
Cut
Whatever doesn't hold is removed, which protects the credibility of everything that stays.
03
Prioritize
Eighty-three findings is a burden. You're handed the few that will actually move the business.
04
Direct
A working session where a CFO still sitting in the chair spells out what to do first, in what order, and where to grow the parts already working.
Why your profit actually moved.
One view that breaks the change in profit into its real causes: price, volume, mix, and cost. You can see in a single picture what moved the number and what didn't. Most owners have never seen this for their own business.
In this read, price held. The decline came from the sales mix shifting toward lower-margin work and overhead climbing faster than revenue. That’s the kind of thing a P&L hides and a structural read makes plain.
// Illustrative · built from the kinds of patterns the scan decomposes
The moves that turn the findings into profit.
Past the diagnosis, this is the part you act on: the specific changes a practicing CFO puts in front of you, ranked by what they return, each with its projected impact on the business.
Reprice the lines where cost rose but price didn't
Twelve products where your cost climbed for two years while the price never moved. Bring them back to market.
+$124,000
per year
Fix the vendor pricing on duplicated items
The same items bought at three different prices across suppliers. Consolidate to the best one.
+$58,000
per year
Reset the account that loses money on every job
Your largest customer by revenue turns out to be your least profitable once cost-to-serve is counted. Reprice or renegotiate.
+$46,000
per year
Tighten terms with your slowest-paying customer
Paid at 71 days, financing itself with your cash. Bring collections back in line and free the working capital.
$60,000
cash freed
Projected annual profit upside
$228,000
Then reinvest the recovered margin into the two lines already earning your best return, where the next growth is cheapest to win.
What the findings add up to.
The same scan, seen as a destination: where the numbers could sit if the top findings are acted on.
Gross margin
31%
+5 pts
Annual profit
$412,000
+$228,000
Cash conversion
84 days
−29 days
// Illustrative · the opportunity the scan identifies, not a guaranteed outcome. Results depend on execution
Built by an operator who has run companies.
The methodology didn't come out of a lab or a model. It came out of thirty years of building companies from nothing, running operations across dozens of countries and industries, and being in the room when businesses broke, and learning, firsthand, how they get fixed.
building and running companies on five continents
of countries run under direct P&L authority
merchant transactions processed at a company he founded
of businesses seen through distress, restructuring, and recovery
Helcyon’s founder spent close to thirty years building and running companies across a wide range of industries, among them chemical manufacturing, distribution, construction, food, real estate, and payments, with direct P&L authority over operations on five continents. Through a payments business that processed over a billion dollars for merchants in nearly every kind of business, from restaurants and retail to contractors and professional services, he watched hundreds move through distress, restructuring, and recovery in real time, and learned in the transactions where the money goes before a company knows it’s in trouble. That is the backbone of the Vital Signs framework, set out across four research papers and a book. Profit Protection puts that read behind your numbers: the engine finds and decomposes what’s in the transactions, and an operator who has seen this across industries decides what it means, what to fix first, and where the business can profitably grow.
One price to find the hidden profit.
Traditional operational / profit review
$15,000–$50,000
Helcyon Profit Protection™
$3,000
The engine has already read every transaction, so the work that took a consulting team weeks takes the scan a fraction of the time, and a practicing CFO reviews the result instead of building it from scratch.
Helcyon Profit Protection™
$3,000 · flat
The full forensic scan, reviewed and directed by a practicing CFO. Everything included.
- Two years of transactions read in full: every customer, product, and vendor
- The forensic profit-leak findings, ranked by what they're worth
- Benchmarked against your own strongest period
- Reviewed and signed by a practicing CFO, CEO, or forensic accountant
- A working session with direct, specific instruction on what to do first
- A prioritized action plan: what to change first, and where to grow next
// Introductory pricing while we build our first results
The questions owners ask.
Who actually reviews my numbers?
A practicing CFO, CEO, or forensic accountant, someone still sitting in the chair, working with us on a fractional or per-project basis, not a retired consultant. They check the findings, sign them, and tell you directly what to do.
How is this different from my accountant or bookkeeper?
They reconcile what already happened. Profit Protection finds money going forward, reviewed by someone at a level most small businesses never get access to.
Can software really understand my business?
It doesn't pretend to. The engine finds the candidates; a human validates every one that matters with you before it ever becomes a recommendation. Nothing reaches you unvetted.
What do you need from me, and does every business qualify?
We connect to your accounting software and read the last two years from it, so the lift on you is minimal. What every scan needs is at least 24 months of history and books that are current and reconciled. Not every business is ready, and that's deliberate. If yours isn't yet, we tell you what to fix first.
What if there isn't much to find?
Then we tell you plainly. The reviewer's honesty is part of what you're buying, and a clean read confirming you run tight is itself worth knowing.
The profit is already in your books.
Three quick questions tell you in seconds whether your books are ready for a scan.
See if your books qualify
// 30-second check · no email required
Do you run on accounting or finance software?
Do you have 24+ months of history?
Are your books current and reconciled?
Larger or multi-entity business, or want to talk it through first?
Talk to someone.