This article is based on my conversation with Pavleta Pavlova, founder of PPHF, on the Roly Poly podcast. Listen to the full episode [here].
When Pavleta Pavlova talks about financial integration after acquisition, she doesn't start with the numbers. She starts with a story about a founder who'd just bought a company running on pen and paper.
Real pen and paper. Every invoice, every receipt, every ledger entry—handwritten, filed by the box load.
The founder's team had to copy. Every single piece of paper. Scan it. Enter it into systems. Reconcile it. Then figure out whether the company was actually profitable or not.
"That's a common problem with founder-led businesses nearing retirement," Pavleta told me. It's the extreme version of something I've seen across dozens of roll-ups: financial infrastructure is radically fragmented. One acquired business runs Xero. Another runs QuickBooks. Another runs Sage. Another runs Google Sheets. Another, apparently, runs pen and paper.
And when you're trying to consolidate, report to investors, and make decisions on numbers you can trust, that fragmentation becomes a bottleneck that most operators don't see coming until it's a crisis.
I spent 90 minutes with Pavleta recently, and what struck me wasn't the crisis stories (though there were plenty). It was how clearly she distinguished between two different problems that most roll-ups conflate:
Accounting (backward-looking: compliance, taxes, statutory reporting) and Finance (forward-looking: growth, capital allocation, integration KPIs, investor confidence).
You need both. But most roll-ups don't realize until too late that they've solved for accounting and missed finance entirely.
Here's what Pavleta learned growing PPHF from 1 client to 10 in roughly 18 months—and what that means for your integration strategy.
The Most Expensive Mistake: Ignoring the Chart of Accounts
Let's start with the mistake Pavleta sees most often.
When you acquire a company, the acquired business has its own chart of accounts. How they categorize revenue. How they bucket expenses. What they call "COGS" versus what they call "operating expense." How they treat intercompany transactions, if they're multi-entity already.
The natural instinct is to leave it alone. Why force change? The business has been profitable. The systems work. Let's just plug them into the group.
"That's where it breaks," Pavleta said.
Fast-forward to audit. You're consolidating financial statements. The group's auditors are asking: How much revenue did the group actually generate? Where did the cost of goods sold go? What are your margins? And suddenly you're trying to reconcile three different definitions of the same thing, under time pressure, with scrutiny from external parties.
"The most expensive mistake a roll-up makes is not standardizing the chart of accounts early," Pavleta told me. "It blows up at audit time."
But it's not just about audit. It's about leadership decision-making. If your finance director is looking at a consolidated P&L where "revenue" means something different in each entity, and "margin" is calculated inconsistently across the group, they're making capital allocation decisions on numbers they can't trust.
"Without standardization, leadership makes decisions on numbers they can't trust," Pavleta said. And that lack of trust cascades: fewer acquisitions get approved, fewer synergies get pursued, fewer investments happen. The bottleneck becomes invisible until you realize you're moving slower than competitors who solved this problem.
The fix sounds simple: standardize the chart of accounts from day one. In practice, it's the hardest part of financial integration because acquired business owners often have good historical reasons for how they structure things, and changing it feels like an affront.
This is where Pavleta's approach matters: show them how change will improve their workload, not just satisfy group reporting.
"Finance teams in acquired companies aren't always open to change. You have to go meet them in person, take the burden away from them, show them how standardization will make their job easier, not harder."
She spends time with the finance team in the acquired business. She listens to their pain points. Then she designs the chart of accounts integration not around group convenience, but around taking work off their plate.
The Three Ownership Questions
Here's what separates financial integrations that work from ones that fall apart: clarity on ownership.
Pavleta breaks it down into three critical questions:
- Who owns the integration? (Setting timelines, managing the process, communicating changes)
- Who owns the reporting? (Building consolidated statements, managing KPIs, ensuring accuracy)
- Who owns the cash? (Managing working capital, cash forecasting, liquidity)
"When that's unclear, trust in the numbers disappears fast," Pavleta said.
In many roll-ups, these responsibilities are fragmented. The CFO owns reporting. The COO owns integration. The group treasurer owns cash. And when something breaks—a variance shows up, a KPI doesn't make sense, cash forecasts are wrong—nobody knows who is accountable for fixing it.
By contrast, the roll-ups scaling successfully have one person who owns each of these three areas, and everyone else in the group knows who that is.
In smaller roll-ups, that might be one person wearing all three hats. In bigger ones, it's a team. But the principle is the same: clear, documented ownership prevents the trust collapse.
The 30-60-90 Day Integration Plan
Pavleta walks new clients through a specific framework that builds from her experience with clients who've acquired 8 businesses in 12 months. (Extreme scale, but the principles apply at any size.)
Before the acquisition closes (the "0-day" phase):
- Familiarize yourself with the target's financial statements and operations. Read past three years of financials. Understand the business model, customer concentration, cash conversion cycle.
- Review financial due diligence findings. Are there any hidden liabilities? Accounts receivable aging? Customer concentration risk?
- Plan the work. Don't wait until closing to decide how you'll integrate finance. Map out the chart of accounts alignment, the reporting structure, the systems consolidation.
- Build the group chart of accounts before you close. Have templates ready. Have the acquired business's structure mapped to the group structure.
- Set up reporting infrastructure in advance. Know what reports you'll need, who needs them, when they're due.
- Pre-set systems for the new acquisition. Will they move to Xero? Will they stay on QuickBooks? Decide now.
First 30 days after closing:
- Establish the new chart of accounts in their existing system (or begin the migration to group systems)
- Start daily cash reporting so you understand what's flowing
- Get clarity on outstanding contracts, customer agreements, supplier terms
- Assign the acquired company a dedicated finance contact at group level
- Set expectations on reporting timelines
Days 30-60:
- Run the first consolidated reporting cycle
- Identify what's working and what needs adjustment in the integration plan
- Handle any system migrations (if needed)
- Build the group's KPI dashboard and set targets
Days 60-90:
- Complete the first full quarter of integrated reporting
- Conduct a lessons-learned session on what worked and what didn't
- Adjust processes based on what you've learned
- Integrate strategic planning: where is the acquired business heading? What investments are needed?
The principle: standardization early, execution focused, communication constant.
"Operators who integrate well have a clear process, set timelines, and communicate changes to founders," Pavleta told me. She sees the opposite with operators who struggle—ad-hoc decisions, shifting timelines, radio silence punctuated by urgent requests.
The Systems Landscape: Xero, QuickBooks, and the Sage Intacct Question
Let's talk about the practical side: what systems is everyone actually using, and when does it become a problem?
Pavleta works primarily with UK roll-ups, so Xero is dominant. US roll-ups typically run QuickBooks. Google Sheets is ubiquitous as an accessibility layer (everyone can edit, collaborate, comment).
Here's the issue: if businesses in your group are on different accounting systems, you can't maintain proper consolidation.
You can export to Excel and manually consolidate. You can use data migration tools. But you lose real-time visibility. You lose the ability to drill into line items. You lose the consistency that investors and auditors expect.
"Having businesses on different accounting systems stops you from maintaining proper consolidation," Pavleta said. This mirrors what we see on the IT side at PMI Stack—when every acquired business runs different CRM, ERP, or operational systems, the data fragmentation makes informed decision-making nearly impossible. Finance and IT are two sides of the same coin here.
For most growing roll-ups, the answer is to mandate one system across the group. Xero for UK roll-ups. QuickBooks for US ones. The cost of standardizing is typically cheaper than the cost of maintaining fragmented systems as you scale to 5, 10, 15 acquired businesses.
There's a graduation point, though. When you reach about 22+ businesses and your revenue is substantial, you might graduate to Sage Intacct, which has a sophisticated intercompany module and consolidation features built in. At that scale, manual consolidation becomes genuinely dangerous—the audit trail, the intercompany eliminations, the variance analysis all become hard to manage without purpose-built software.
But you don't need Sage Intacct at acquisition 3 or 4. You need standardization. You need one system everyone uses. And you need someone (the finance person you hire, or the fractional CFO) who understands how to configure it so that your chart of accounts, your reporting, and your consolidation are automatic rather than manual.
When to Hire a Fractional CFO (And When Not To)
This is where Pavleta's positioning gets specific, because it directly contradicts what many operators assume.
Many roll-ups think: I'll do the first couple of deals. If it works, I'll hire a fractional CFO for the third one.
Pavleta's answer: too late.
"You should bring in a fractional CFO not at the second acquisition, but one month before the first deal closes."
Why? Because the work isn't post-integration. The work is pre-integration. It's designing the holdco structure, building the group chart of accounts, setting up the reporting infrastructure, and pre-staging the systems before the acquired company comes in.
If you wait until after close, you're reactively trying to get ahead of a process that should have been designed in advance.
"Pre-set the hold-co structure, chart of accounts, reporting, systems," she said. "A full-time CFO probably makes sense around acquisition 6-7, depending on revenue size. But a fractional CFO should come in much earlier."
The engagement model varies, but Pavleta typically works on a retainer basis—supporting the integration, advising on finance infrastructure, managing the consolidation process, working with accountants on reporting. It's not just "do my taxes," it's "help me design the finance function for a company that doesn't exist yet but will in 30 days."
The ROI isn't hard to calculate. If a fractional CFO helps you avoid a chart of accounts disaster that costs you £100K at audit time, or helps you catch a customer concentration risk during due diligence that saves you from a bad deal, the engagement has paid for itself.
By the Third Acquisition, You Need a Playbook
Here's a phrase Pavleta used that stuck with me: "By the third acquisition, you need a playbook. Don't reinvent the process."
Most operators reinvent integration process for every deal. Different timelines, different priorities, different people involved. It's inefficient and error-prone.
The operators scaling successfully run the same integration process every time. Not rigidly—they flex based on what they find. But they have a template. They have documented steps. They have standard reporting, standard KPI frameworks, standard systems configurations.
Pavleta builds that playbook with clients by the third deal. She documents what worked, what didn't, and converts it into a repeatable process.
"It's not about speed. It's about credibility," Pavleta told me. "Quick financial controls matter more than speed. Standardize chart of accounts, reporting, and KPIs from day one."
She's seen the opposite: operators who try to integrate faster than they can manage, who skip steps to save time, who end up with a mountain of work at audit time because the foundations weren't built properly. It's a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach.
The roll-ups winning are the ones who are willing to be disciplined about the process. They move at a sustainable pace. They document what they learn. And by the time they get to acquisition 4 and 5, the integration is smooth because they've refined it based on data, not intuition.
What I'm Taking Away
Pavleta's journey - from 12 years in finance, learning the roll-up world at ThreeCodes under Alex at Roll Up Europe, to building PPHF and scaling from 1 client to 10 in roughly 18 months—is a masterclass in understanding where the real bottleneck is.
Most operators focus on deal sourcing and operational integration. They get distracted by "bolt-on synergies" and cost-cutting. What they underestimate is how foundational financial infrastructure has to be.
Here's what stuck with me:
- Financial integration is not optional. The most expensive mistakes are invisible until audit time. By then, it's too late to fix efficiently.
- The chart of accounts is non-negotiable. If you don't standardize early, you'll pay for it in reconciliation work, audit fees, and decision-making inertia. The operators winning are the ones who bite this off first.
- Ownership clarity prevents trust collapse. One person owns integration. One owns reporting. One owns cash. When that's clear, everything else gets easier.
- Fractional CFO involvement should start pre-close, not post-close. You're building the foundation for a company that doesn't exist yet. You need someone experienced doing it.
- By deal three, you need a playbook. Don't reinvent process. Learn from what worked, document it, and run the same integrated process every time.
- It's not about speed. It's about credibility. The finance function is what investors look at when they're deciding whether to fund your next round or pull a credit line. Treating it as a back-office function is how you limit your own ceiling.
Pavleta's clear: "Finance is the real bottleneck." Not sales. Not operations. The ability to consolidate, report, and make decisions on numbers you trust. That's what determines how fast you can scale and how much capital you can access.
The roll-ups that nail this are the ones who grow from 1 to 10 acquisitions smoothly. The ones who don't? They get stuck around acquisition 2 or 3, wondering why the foundation feels unstable.
You now know what separates them.
