DFG Advisory
© DFG Advisory Pte Ltd · Singapore
The hardest part was not building the technology. It was finding the real problem.
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The hardest part was not building the technology. It was finding the real problem.
Our client, an education provider, was struggling to reconcile government funding against individual students. Before meetings with funding agencies, management spent significant time using spreadsheets and VLOOKUPs to understand what remained outstanding.
It looked like a reporting problem. It wasn't. The information feeding the reports was already unreliable. Before building a better dashboard, we had to understand why.
DFG traced the client's process end to end — from student registration and course transfers to invoicing, credit notes, payments and government funding.
The problem wasn't in one spreadsheet. It was being created by the way operational events flowed — or failed to flow — into accounting.
When a student transferred after a course had commenced, the operational system recognised the transfer — but the corresponding credit note was not always triggered against the original invoice.
Finding this required more than reviewing the accounts. We had to understand how an unfamiliar operational system behaved, when the credit note should be triggered, and under what circumstances that trigger failed.
Without that understanding, accounting could continue showing government funding as outstanding for a course the student had already left.
The solution wasn't another reconciliation. The transaction flow itself had to be fixed.
Student tests revealed another issue. Payments were often received before test dates were confirmed, while invoices were generated later when the test was booked.
Because the operational system already showed payment as received, the subsequent invoice did not always flow correctly into accounting — leaving amounts appearing as prepayments or overpayments even after the service had been arranged.
Again, the accounting issue was a symptom. The process was the cause.
Once the underlying processes were understood and corrected, DFG used AI-assisted development to build the matching and reporting solution around the client's actual operation.
Government disbursements could now be connected with student and course records, giving management clearer visibility over outstanding funding, ageing, expected receipts and cash-flow impact.
AI helped us build the solution faster. But AI wasn't what identified the problem.
That required understanding an unfamiliar operational system, tracing transactions across operations and accounting, and identifying exactly where information stopped flowing correctly.
DFG's experience across audit, multinational organisations and growing businesses in different industries, combined with strong technology capability, allows us to approach problems from both a finance and systems perspective. AI gives us the ability to turn that understanding into working solutions faster.
Accounting tells us what the numbers should mean.
Systems thinking helps us understand why they don't.
AI helps us turn that understanding into a solution.
DFG Advisory