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The Method

Four questions.
In this order.

The Control Method is the four-part financial diagnostic CMNC Associates runs inside every client business. It answers Your Number, Your Position, Your History and Your Plan, in that sequence, and it exists because of the gap shown here. Most founder-led businesses are not short of cash. They are short of visibility.

Mario Christoforou, Founder CMNC Associates Limited Updated 19 Aug 2026 HMRC AML Supervised
Cash PositionLive Reconciliation
What the bank says
£128,400
  • VAT held, not yours−£19,240
  • Corporation tax accruing−£24,600
  • Payroll and PAYE due−£41,300
  • Committed supplier spend−£31,400
Your Position
What is actually yours to spend
£11,860
9% of the headline balance
Illustrative figures. The amounts differ in every business.
The gap does not.
Definition

The Control Method is a four-part financial diagnostic used by CMNC Associates to install financial control in founder-led UK B2B service businesses. It answers four questions in a fixed order: Your Number, the monthly cash figure the business must hit to be stable. Your Position, the real cash available once every known liability is stripped out. Your History, twelve to eighteen months of cash movement rebuilt and categorised. Your Plan, the priority actions for the next thirty days, ninety days and year.

The order is the method

Each answer is an input to the next. A plan written without a reconciled cash position is a guess with a deadline attached. A cash position with no target to measure it against is just a balance. Working these four questions out of sequence is the single most common reason a founder can hold a stack of financial reports and still be unable to make a decision from them.

I
Your Number
Sets the target the position is measured against.
II
Your Position
Establishes the true starting point for any plan.
III
Your History
Supplies the evidence the plan is argued from.
IV
Your Plan
Converts the first three answers into decisions.

Founders rarely arrive with no information. They arrive with too much of the wrong kind: a bookkeeping file that reconciles, year-end accounts nine months out of date, a bank balance refreshed on a phone at midnight, and a private sense that none of it adds up to an answer. The gap is not effort. Nobody has ever put the four questions in an order that makes each one answerable.

The method is deliberately narrow. It does not rebuild a finance function, replace an accountant or model five years of growth. It establishes what is true, what is available, what has been happening, and what to do about it. Everything CMNC delivers afterwards is the same four answers, kept current.

The Four Parts

What each question produces

Every part ends in a defined output. Nothing here is advisory in the loose sense: each question closes with a figure, a schedule or a written decision the founder can act on the same week.

I
The Target

What is Your Number?

Your Number is the single monthly cash figure the business must bring in to be stable. It is built from the ground up: operating costs, director's pay, corporation tax, VAT and a reserve contribution. It replaces the revenue target most founders carry in their head, which almost never accounts for the money that was never theirs to begin with.

  • Built from the real cost base, not last year's budget or an ambition.
  • Includes the tax and VAT that sits in the account looking like profit.
  • Includes director's pay treated as a cost, not as what happens to be left over.
  • Stated as one figure per month, testable against the bank feed.
OutputOne number. Hit it and the business is stable. Miss it and you know by exactly how much.
Feeds → Your Position
II
The Truth

What is Your Position?

Your Position is the real cash available once every known liability is stripped out of the bank balance, stated alongside runway in months. The headline balance and the genuinely available figure are two different numbers. The distance between them is where founders overcommit, and closing it is what the whole method is built for.

  • Bank balances reconciled to the accounting system and the last filed accounts.
  • Tax, VAT, payroll and committed spend removed and shown separately.
  • Runway in months against the current cost base, not a best case.
  • No balancing figures. Every component is sourced, never derived as a plug.
OutputAvailable cash and runway. The standing rule: we do not show a number we cannot tie to source.
Feeds → Your History
III
The Evidence

What is Your History?

Your History is twelve to eighteen months of cash movement rebuilt and categorised consistently, month by month. Consistency is the whole point. Most businesses have transaction data categorised three different ways by three different people, which makes trends invisible. Recategorise it once, properly, and the pattern that has been costing money for two years becomes obvious in an afternoon.

  • Every transaction assigned a category and sub-category using the same logic.
  • Seasonality made visible: the months that fund the year and the months that drain it.
  • Operating costs broken out by sub-category, including the quiet subscription drift.
  • Revenue analysed by pattern rather than by invoice date.
OutputA categorised twelve to eighteen month history. The evidence base every later decision is argued from.
Feeds → Your Plan
IV
The Decision

What is Your Plan?

Your Plan is the priority-ordered set of actions that follows from the first three answers. Thirty days for what stops the bleeding. Ninety days for stabilisation. Twelve months for direction. It is written down, it is specific, and it is built around what the founder actually wants from the business rather than a generic growth curve.

  • Thirty days: immediate corrections, ranked by cash impact.
  • Ninety days: the stabilisation target and the reserve position to reach.
  • Twelve months: direction, set against what the founder wants personally.
  • Ownership: every action carries a name and a date, including ours.
OutputA written plan in priority order. Not a list of options. A decision about what to do first and what to stop.
Feeds → The next month
The Shift

What changes once the four answers exist

The output of the method is not a document. It is a change in how decisions get made. Financial knowledge stops living in the founder's head and starts living in a structure the business can use, which is the difference between a business that depends on one person and a business that can be handed over, scaled, or sold.

01

The founder stops being the operating system

The numbers move out of one person's memory and into a monthly structure. Anyone senior can read the position without asking the founder what it means.

02

Decisions stop being reopened

Hiring, pricing and spending arguments get settled against a figure rather than an instinct. Less circular discussion, fewer decisions revisited a month later.

03

Risk becomes visible before it becomes expensive

A cost base drifting, a client concentration building, a VAT quarter that will not be covered. All of it surfaces early enough to be worth acting on.

04

The business becomes easier to scrutinise

When a lender, a buyer or an investor asks, the numbers already tell one consistent story. Nothing has to be assembled under pressure.

Boundaries

How the Control Method differs from the alternatives

The Control Method is not bookkeeping, not year-end compliance, and not a fractional CFO day rate. It is a fixed-scope diagnostic producing four specific answers in two to three weeks, followed by a monthly system that keeps them current. It sits above the accountant and below a full-time finance hire.

OptionWhat it answersWhen you get itTypical UK cost, 2026
BookkeeperAre the records accurate and reconciled?Monthly, in arrears£300 to £600 per month
AccountantWhat did last year look like, for HMRC and Companies House?Annually, up to nine months after year endFixed annual fee
Outsourced finance functionCan someone else run the finance admin and produce management accounts?Monthly£1,200 to £5,000 per month
Fractional CFOWhatever is in front of them on the days you buyOne to three days a week£700 to £1,400 per day, or £3,000 to £10,000+ per month
The Control MethodYour Number, Your Position, Your History, Your PlanTwo to three weeks, then every monthFixed fee, published on the pricing page

Cost ranges for the alternatives are indicative UK market figures for 2026, drawn from published provider pricing and market surveys listed in the sources below.

The Context

Why visibility is the binding constraint in 2026

UK small business sales growth slowed to a two-year low in the March 2026 quarter while invoices continued to be paid late. Insolvency activity rose between the final quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 even as the annual trend fell. For a founder-led service business, the pressure rarely announces itself. It arrives as a working capital cycle that quietly stretched.

2.9%
UK small business sales growth in the March 2026 quarter, the smallest rise in two years and well below the long-term average of 8.5%.
Xero Small Business Insights, 2026
8.2 days
Average lateness on invoices paid to UK small businesses in the same quarter, drawn from 440,000 UK businesses running on Xero.
Xero Small Business Insights, 2026
17.48m
Overdue invoices on UK books in Q1 2026, up 3% year on year, carried by around 1.57 million businesses.
R3 Business Health Report, Q1 2026

None of that is an argument for panic and CMNC does not sell one. It is an argument for knowing your position monthly rather than annually. A profitable business can fail because its customers moved from 30 days to 75 while its own suppliers, payroll and HMRC obligations stayed exactly where they were. That failure is entirely visible in advance, to anyone actually looking.

Applied

The method in practice

The Control Method runs at two scales. In founder-led service businesses turning £1M to £15M it is a fixed-fee diagnostic followed by a monthly system. At board level it runs as a twelve-month engagement covering group cash visibility, board reporting, financial controls and finance leadership.

The board-level version is currently running inside a multi-entity UK logistics group under a twelve-month statement of work. Every figure released in that engagement passes a set of reconciliation gates before publication: monthly net movement must tie out per entity, roll-forward continuity must hold, and the liquidity bridge must foot. Where a genuine unreconciled remainder exists, it gets its own labelled line rather than being absorbed into something meaningful.

At the smaller scale, three outcomes from CMNC client work:

Client A · B2B Service Business
Revenue£900k → £1.4M
Profit£200k → £350k
Cash in bank£41k → £225k
Client B · Founder-Led B2B
Revenue£1.3M → £2.5M
Cash received£1.6M → £3.1M
Forward viewIn control
Client C · The Reframe
Reported£60k loss
Actual position£27k profit
DifferenceThe truth

Client identities withheld under engagement confidentiality. Figures are actual client results, anonymised.

See what the monthly pack actually looks like, with two working sample dashboards.

The Exchange

What the method requires from you

Most firms tell you what you get. This is what we need in return, because the method fails without it. Give us the real picture, one decision-maker, and a genuine willingness to act on what becomes visible. Where those conditions are missing, the method produces a report rather than a change, and neither of us wants that.

What you give

  • Read access.  The accounting system, every bank account, every facility.
  • The complete picture.  Including the parts that are uncomfortable. Especially those.
  • One decision-maker.  Someone who can approve without a committee.
  • A willingness to act.  Visibility only pays if something changes afterwards.

What you get back

  • Four answers  you can state out loud without checking first.
  • The uncomfortable question  asked out loud, early, while it is still cheap.
  • A written plan  in priority order, with owners and dates attached.
  • A structure that holds  when a lender, buyer or investor starts asking.

Who the method is built for

Built for

  • UK-based B2B businesses selling time, expertise or outcomes
  • £1M to £15M annual revenue, with consistent monthly revenue
  • A single trading entity
  • Running on Xero
  • A founder who wants to be coached, not just reported to

Not built for

  • Product businesses, where stock and margin mechanics dominate
  • Businesses below £1M revenue
  • Businesses not on Xero
  • Founders who want the numbers taken away and handled
  • Anyone wanting a bespoke scope built from scratch

Multi-entity groups and businesses above £15M are handled as a separate engagement rather than as a version of the standard product. Raise it on the call.

Questions

Common questions about the Control Method

What is the Control Method?

The Control Method is a four-part financial diagnostic used by CMNC Associates. It answers four questions in a fixed order: Your Number, the monthly cash figure the business must hit to be stable; Your Position, the real cash available once liabilities are stripped out; Your History, twelve to eighteen months of categorised cash movement; and Your Plan, the priority actions for the next year.

Why does the order of the four questions matter?

Each answer is an input to the next. A plan built without a reconciled cash position is a guess. A cash position calculated without a target to measure it against is just a balance. Working out of order is the most common reason founders have financial reports and still cannot make decisions from them.

How is the Control Method different from what my accountant does?

An accountant reports what already happened, to a statutory deadline, for HMRC and Companies House. That work is necessary and CMNC does not replace it. The Control Method works forward. It exists to answer what the business can safely spend, commit and pay itself this month, and it runs on an operating cadence rather than an annual one.

How long does the Control Method take to complete?

Two to three weeks. It is delivered as the Financial Health Assessment, a fixed-fee engagement. Every CMNC client starts here, without exception, including clients who arrive certain they only want the monthly service.

Who is the Control Method for?

UK-based B2B service businesses selling time, expertise or outcomes rather than products, turning £1M to £15M a year, operating as a single trading entity, using Xero, with a founder willing to change how decisions get made. It is not built for product businesses or for businesses below £1M.

Is the Control Method the same as a cash flow forecast?

No. A forecast is a projection built on assumptions, and a forecast built on an unreconciled starting position compounds the error forward. The Control Method starts with reconciled fact: what the business actually holds, actually owes and actually spent. The forward view is an output of that work rather than a substitute for it.

What happens after the diagnostic is complete?

Clients who continue move onto the Control Pack, a monthly retainer that keeps the four answers current. It includes a month-end report by working day ten, cash allocated twice a month, a monthly review call with written follow-up, a weekly check-in and access between sessions. Some clients take the diagnostic, act on the plan themselves and come back later. That is a legitimate outcome.

Do I need to change accountants to use the Control Method?

No. CMNC works alongside your existing accountant and does not compete for compliance work. The relationship usually improves, because the year end arrives with a categorised, reconciled twelve months behind it rather than a scramble.

What does CMNC need from the client for the method to work?

Full read access to the accounting system and bank accounts, the complete picture including the parts that are uncomfortable, one named decision-maker who can approve without a committee, and a genuine willingness to act on what becomes visible. Where those conditions are absent, the method produces a report rather than a change.

Sources

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answers actually are.

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