What separates a serious provider from an opportunist in retrospective analysis?

The market for retrospective transaction analyses, VAT reviews and recovery of funds has grown quickly in recent years. More providers offer similar services, with very varying actual competence and delivery capacity. This makes it harder for a buyer to tell who can actually deliver, since most tenders and descriptions sound much alike on the surface.

Why it is hard to see the difference in advance

Retrospective analysis is not a standardised consulting service. It requires deep understanding of finance systems, contract structure, VAT rules and transaction logic. A provider without that competence seldom delivers a result that is obviously wrong, but rather an analysis that is superficial or fragmentary, a result that looks like a result without actually being one. This makes quality hard to assess until the assignment has already been carried out.

What can actually be checked

The difference between a specialist and a generalist can be made measurable, if you ask for the right things:

• Volume of comparable assignments. How many similar analyses the provider has carried out during a defined period, not how long the company has existed.
• Who carried out the work. Which roles took part in the analysis, and whether they were the same people as those described in the tender.
• Measurable result. What the actual effect was, in recovered funds or other verifiable change, not a description of the way of working.
• Where the workload ended up. A recurring difference is that providers without sufficient capacity move data extraction, interpretation and quality assurance over to the buyer’s own staff. This makes the service cheaper at the procurement stage but more expensive and less reliable in practice.

What an incomplete way of working risks missing

An analysis that focuses on individual hits or random discrepancies can look active without capturing the systematic patterns that have the greatest effect. Structural weaknesses in a contract or a system routine seldom produce one single large discrepancy, but many small ones that together become significant. Finding them requires going through the whole material, not only what has already been flagged automatically.

What Refero does about it

Refero works exclusively with this type of analysis, takes responsibility for the whole chain from data extraction to verified result, and always states what time is required from the client before work begins.

Read more about how an analysis works or about how to procure a financial review.