From a 5-week close cycle to a 4-day board package

Where they started

Cardinal Electric Holdings is a composite illustration of a PE-backed electrical services roll-up operating across two contiguous regions. At acquisition, the 9 subsidiary companies each ran their own financial operations: a mix of QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, and one running Xero. Chart of accounts differed across every entity — what one company called "materials" another split into "wire & conduit" and "fixtures," making gross margin impossible to compare without manual reclassification.

The close cycle was the biggest operational drag. Subsidiaries closed at different times — some by the 5th, others by the 20th. The platform CFO had to wait for the last entity before producing a consolidated view, which meant the GP routinely received portfolio financials 5–6 weeks after month-end. By the time the numbers landed, they described a month that was already half-forgotten.

The integration task was compounded by a multi-state licensing complexity unique to electrical: journeyman and master license requirements vary by state, which meant technician headcount and comp structure couldn't be standardized platform-wide without first mapping license status per employee across all 9 entities. That mapping didn't exist anywhere in a usable format.

The 90-day plan

Cardinal compressed the 100-day integration playbook into 90 days, front-loading the COA standardization that had stalled every previous integration attempt. The sequencing was deliberate: no KPI tracking until the chart of accounts was locked, no automated reporting until the close cadence was consistent.

What actually changed (before / after)

These are the eight operational metrics Cardinal tracked at Day 0 and Day 90:

The hard parts

The COA negotiation was harder than expected — not technically, but organizationally. Three of the subsidiary GMs had been running their companies for 10+ years with their own reporting conventions. The residential/commercial/new-construction revenue split required reclassifying roughly 18 months of historical revenue data for two entities, which the GMs initially resisted because it changed their reported gross margins. The CFO resolved it by running the recomputation first and showing GMs what their margins looked like under the new framework — in most cases, the platform standard made their margins look better, not worse, because it correctly excluded non-recurring equipment purchases from the cost base.

Multi-state licensing complexity turned out to be a reporting problem more than an integration problem. The mapping of journeyman/master status to technician headcount per state mattered for labor cost allocation (licensed technicians carry a wage premium) — once that data existed in a consistent format, RollForge's cost-per-job breakdown could finally reflect real field costs. The mapping took one week to build; the cost-visibility improvement was immediate.

The QBD-to-CSV path for two entities was simpler than the team expected. The upload wizard accepted QBD report exports directly and mapped the account codes against the target COA automatically — with a manual review step for the 6 accounts that didn't map cleanly. Total time: 90 minutes per entity across two sessions.

What Day 90 actually looked like

The lender call that prompted the integration project — a refinancing across three entities — happened on Day 88. The CFO opened the loan package builder, selected all three entities, and generated a combined 3-entity Banker-Ready Package in 40 minutes. The package included trailing 12-month P&Ls with normalized add-backs, DSCR calculated against current debt, AR aging, and an AI-generated executive narrative specific to the electrical services industry context.

The lender asked three follow-up questions about technician headcount trends and seasonal revenue concentration. The CFO answered them live off the RollForge dashboard without pulling a single spreadsheet.

What comes next

Cardinal's next phase is acquisition-readiness infrastructure: a standardized due diligence checklist that can score new electrical targets in under a week, automated integration risk scoring before LOI, and DSCR-scenario modeling for two active pipeline targets. The data discipline they built in 90 days means new acquisitions don't reset the clock — they inherit the platform standard from Day 1.

The license-to-technician mapping they built for the integration is now a competitive moat: Cardinal can model post-acquisition labor cost more accurately than competitors who haven't done the mapping, which lets them price acquisitions more precisely without leaving margin on the table.