Started With A Spreadsheet That Refused To Behave
Back in 2018, I was sitting in a Melbourne café watching three colleagues argue over why their project had blown past its budget by forty percent. The spreadsheet they were using had formulas written on top of formulas, and nobody could figure out where the numbers were actually coming from.
That moment stuck with me because I'd seen the same problem everywhere. Businesses knew they were overspending, but tracking down the exact reasons felt like detective work. The tools available were either too complicated for everyday use or too simple to catch the real issues. So I started building something different.
Learning From Real Miscalculations
I spent eighteen months talking to project managers, finance teams, and small business owners across Victoria and New South Wales. Most of them had the same frustration—they could see money disappearing but couldn't pinpoint exactly where or why without hours of manual digging.
One construction company in Sydney showed me how a single material cost increase had rippled through twelve different projects, but their system only flagged it weeks later. A marketing agency in Brisbane was routinely underestimating their contractor hours by twenty percent because nobody was comparing estimates to actuals in real time.
These weren't careless people. They were professionals who simply didn't have tools that made deviation tracking straightforward.
How We Actually Approach Budget Analysis
Instead of building another complicated financial platform, we focused on making deviation detection feel natural. These three principles guide everything we build.
Compare As You Go
Most budget problems happen gradually, not all at once. Our system tracks spending against projections continuously, so you catch small deviations before they compound into big ones. No waiting for month-end reports to discover you've already overspent.
Show The Context
A number by itself doesn't tell you much. When we flag a deviation, we also show you what changed, when it started shifting, and which related areas might be affected. Understanding the story behind the numbers makes better decisions possible.
Keep It Readable
Financial data can be overwhelming. We deliberately avoid cluttered dashboards and jargon-heavy reports. Instead, you get clear visualizations and plain language explanations that your whole team can actually use without needing an accounting degree.
Following One Client's Budget Recovery
Finding The Hidden Patterns
A Perth-based logistics company came to us in early 2024 after three consecutive quarters of unexpected cost overruns. Their finance director thought it was fuel prices, but the data told a different story.
After mapping their spending patterns, we found the real culprit: their vendor contracts had automatic escalation clauses that kicked in at different times throughout the year. Nobody had been tracking these increases against the original budgets, so each one felt like a surprise expense.
Building Better Visibility
We set up automated tracking that flagged these contract escalations thirty days before they hit. This gave their purchasing team time to either renegotiate or adjust other budget areas to compensate.
Within two quarters, they'd reduced their budget variance from forty-three percent down to eleven percent—not by cutting services, but simply by anticipating changes instead of reacting to them after the fact.
Maintaining Control Over Time
The interesting part wasn't just the initial fix. Six months later, they were using deviation data to forecast more accurately for 2025. Their budget proposals now include realistic variance buffers based on actual historical patterns rather than hopeful estimates.
This kind of ongoing improvement is what we're after—not a one-time cleanup, but a sustainable way to stay aware of where your money's actually going.
Kieran Fjellström
Founder & Lead Analyst
I've been working with financial data since 2012, but honestly learned more from frustrated clients than any textbook. What keeps me interested is finding the patterns people miss when they're too close to their own numbers.
Before starting kirvalentoph, I spent five years at a consulting firm helping mid-sized companies untangle their budget problems. The pattern I kept seeing was that the tools themselves were creating more confusion than clarity. So I left to build something that worked differently.
These days I split my time between developing our analysis methods and working directly with clients who need help making sense of complicated financial situations. If you're dealing with budget variances you can't explain, let's talk through what's happening.
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