Twenty-two days, including a parallel run.
Five phases with named deliverables and a sign-off at each. Longer than the other Akontec files by design — a finance handover without a parallel run is a handover no controller will accept.
Mobilisation Day 1–4
Akontec: service agreement, NDA and infosec schedule executed; desk and VPS provisioned; delivery manager, technical owner and billing owner named. You: reviewer nominated with their finance credentials confirmed, ledger roles agreed, banking and GST submitted. Sign-off: desk live, reviewer access tested.
Chart of accounts and history Day 3–8
Akontec: the client's chart of accounts, coding rules, approval matrix, tolerances, expense policy and close calendar written into the spec; coding history, master data, prior treatments and recurring journals indexed. You: nothing yet. Sign-off: spec issued with open items listed rather than guessed — expect several around approval limits.
Desk build and bench Day 5–16
Akontec: ten agents given duties, bound to tools, controls built, and run against replayed historical transactions; per-agent, per-transaction-type accuracy reported. The control narrative is written here for the client's auditor. You: reviewer completes ledger training. Sign-off: bench report and control narrative shared.
Parallel run Day 16–20
Akontec: the desk processes live transactions and posts nothing, beside the client's own processing. You: your reviewer works the full queue and compares line by line with the client's controller. Sign-off: the client's controller confirms agreement. This is the phase that earns the account, and it is not compressed for anyone.
Staged handover Day 20–22
Akontec: cycles handed over one at a time, lowest risk first — master data, expenses, reconciliation preparation, then payables. Approval, posting and payment never transfer. You: clear the queue daily. Sign-off: go-live declared; the 45-day allocation clock starts; 90-day supervised support begins.
What can delay it
A client whose approval matrix has never been written down, a chart of accounts with no discipline behind it, missing coding history, or a reviewer who is not free. All four surface in week one and we will say so rather than let the date slip quietly.
What does not delay it
Hiring, seat build-out, F&A recruitment, training batches, attrition backfill, software licensing. None of it exists on this file.
Timing note
We schedule go-live to land after a close rather than during one. A handover in the first week of a month is a handover into the busiest days of the cycle, and it is not worth the four-day saving.
Twenty-two days, and no hiring in any of them.
Start with the walkthrough. If the fit is right, mobilisation begins the week the agreement is signed.