Kennedy Maweu

Nobody else knows how the reconciliation actually works. Somewhere in your company there is one person who holds the month-end close in her head. Call her Grace. If Grace resigns, you inherit a process nobody can run. Most COOs know this and do nothing, because "document the process" is a task nobody has time for. Here is the 45-minute version. Sit Grace down with Claude and this prompt: "You are a process analyst. Interview me step by step about how I perform the month-end close. Ask one question at a time. Probe for exceptions, workarounds, and things I do from memory that are written nowhere. When finished, produce a numbered SOP another accountant could follow without asking me anything, flagging every step that depends on my personal judgment." Forty-five minutes of her answering questions. Out comes the document you have been meaning to write for three years. The flagged judgment steps are your real key-person risk. Fix those first. Save this post.

KES 40 million bought an ERP nobody opens. That is what a manufacturing client paid three years before I met them. Licences, consultants, a go-live party with a cake. Last month I sat in their Nairobi office and watched the month-end close happen. Not one number came out of the ERP. The plant accountant exported to Excel, cleaned it, emailed it to head office, where someone re-typed it into another spreadsheet. The real system of record was WhatsApp. Nobody was being lazy. The ERP was built for the process the consultants designed. The team runs the process reality demands. Those are different companies. The fix was not more training. We built the workflow layer on top of the Excel-and-WhatsApp reality: extraction, checks, and a draft close pack, produced in hours instead of days. The system did not fail. The assumption that people would change for it did. What is your most expensive piece of unused software?

AI readiness will show up in your due diligence report before it shows up in your P&L. PE firms buying into East Africa are already asking a new question in diligence: how dependent is this business on manual processes and irreplaceable individuals? A company where month-end close, credit approvals, and reporting live in three people's heads is a key-person risk line item, and key-person risk gets priced into the multiple. The operators who document and automate core workflows now are not chasing efficiency. They are protecting exit value. Waiting until the sale process starts means fixing two years of process debt in ninety days, under scrutiny, at the worst possible negotiating moment. Agree or disagree?

HR Directors spend hours every quarter reading exit interview notes and producing nothing the COO can act on. Here is a Claude prompt that turns that pile into a board-ready signal in ten minutes: "I am pasting anonymised exit interview notes from the last quarter. Identify the top 5 recurring reasons for departure, ranked by frequency. For each: quote two supporting phrases, name the department pattern if one exists, and state one retention action with an estimated cost. Flag any mention of a specific manager or policy as a separate risk item. Format as a one-page summary I can table at the next executive meeting." Two rules before you run it: remove names and ID numbers first (DPA 2019 applies to employee data, and ODPC is now enforcing), and treat the output as a draft you verify, not a verdict. The gap between HR that reports headcount and HR that predicts attrition is one working system like this. Save this post.

Twelve days. That is how long month-end close was taking at a 400-person firm I sat with in June. Not because the finance team is weak. Because three people hold the whole process in their heads: one knows the reconciliation quirks, one knows which suppliers invoice late, one knows how the ERP actually behaves versus how the manual says it behaves. When one of them travels, the close stretches to fifteen days. The board pack goes out stale. The CFO presents numbers that are already three weeks old by the time anyone acts on them. The fix was not new software. It was extracting what those three people know into documented, AI-assisted workflows that anyone on the team can run. Close is now tracking under six days. Here is the question that started it: if your best finance person resigned today, how many days would your close take next month?