Engagement Proposal — Benefit Cloud × Appleton Advisors

§ 01 · What we heard

You don't have a numbers problem. You have a visibility problem.

“I never have a good idea of where we are on a month-to-month basis with actual cash flow — which stresses me out that that is even true.”

Monday's conversation, distilled:

Hiring on a hunch. A new hire starts August 10 and the honest answer to “can we cover her?” lives in a hand-built budget maintained nights and weekends for five years.

Books you can't touch. QuickBooks Desktop, held by an outside firm, closed on their schedule — the 15th, the 20th, sometimes later. You check the bank account daily because it's the only real-time signal you have.

Manual everything. Invoicing by hand, AR audits by hand, check runs to a PO box, phantom-equity math in a spreadsheet, budget season in a war room of one.

Ambition without infrastructure. A $10M-scale data conversation with Citadel, PEO decisions in flight, R&D credits to harvest — and no system built to support any of it.

§ 02 · Already agreed

Decisions we shook on Monday

First Citizens → Ramp.
Treasury, bill pay, and operating cash move to Ramp: ~2% on operating, ~4% treasury sweep, segregated sub-accounts, no fees to argue about monthly.

The Amex split.
Amex stays for the big, point-rich purchases — conference sponsorships, AWS. Ramp takes team spend, subscriptions, and burner cards for everything that slips through cracks.

The 90-day portal.
A bespoke financial operations portal — the second brain — built on your data, live by day 90. UKG Ready stays exactly where it is.

§ 03 · Scope

One engagement, three layers

Everything below is included. No modules, no upsells.

Layer 1 — The rails

Ramp migration, run by us: treasury + sweep accounts, bill pay, corporate & virtual cards with vendor-level limits, receipt automation synced to the books. Your lift: approvals and about two hours.
QuickBooks Desktop → Online migration, and with it something you've never had: direct access to your own books.
We own the monthly close. Books closed within 5–10 days of month-end — our standard — with a monthly operating report you don't have to build.
Collections, tracked — every open invoice and paper check (yes, including the Minutemen) in one view.

Layer 2 — The brain (your portal)

Live dashboards: cash position, 13-week cash flow forecast, revenue & collections, opex by category, headcount.
Budget vs. actuals with category-level planning — the five-year spreadsheet, retired.
Scenario modeling on the fly: “can we afford the hire on August 10?” answered in seconds, not stomach acid. Save and compare scenarios.
R&D tax credit report built to Tyler's exact formulas — salaries, software, equipment, tracked all year, filing-ready.
Phantom equity / PIU tracking out of Google Sheets, into the system of record.
Document engine: NDAs, consulting and employment agreements generated from your own LaTeX templates, on your letterhead.
Integrations: QuickBooks Online, HubSpot pipeline, UKG Ready, Ramp, Stripe. Where an API lags, we maintain the data by hand until it doesn't.
Exit-ready by construction: tax & compliance calendar, Nexus watch, and a diligence-grade data room that's always current.

Layer 3 — The advisors

Monthly operating review with both founders — the numbers, the drivers, the decisions ahead.
Tax strategy, year-round: R&D credits, the cashback-to-gift-card bonus play, entity and state questions — Tyler gets a sparring partner who also lives for this.
Deal support, included: Citadel data-feed pricing & negotiation, SaaS contract review, M&A and fundraise advisory when the moment comes. No separate meter running.
Hiring & comp support: cost-of-hire modeling, offer generation, phantom-pool administration.

§ 04 · The 90 days

From kickoff to portal-live

Days 1–30

Rails down

Ramp underwritten, cards issued, treasury + sub-accounts live
First Citizens wind-down; Amex split configured
QBD → QBO migration decided & started

Days 31–60

Close & connect

First close on our watch (5–10 day standard)
QBO, HubSpot, UKG Ready, Stripe integrations flowing
Budget vs. actuals + 13-week cash flow live

Days 61–90

Brain online

Full portal live: dashboards, scenarios, R&D report, docs, data room
PIU tracker migrated; collections tracker running
90-day review & the road beyond

Target kickoff: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 · Portal live by ~October 26, 2026.

§ 05 · Pricing

One number. Everything above.

Monthly retainer

$5,000

per month · all-inclusive

90-day build and ongoing operations at the same rate. No setup fee, no per-seat pricing, no hourly meters — deal support included.

Term	Initial 90 days, then month-to-month. 30 days' notice to end, no strings.
What it replaces	~$60K/yr of measured opportunity cost in founder time, idle cash, and fees — from your own statements.
What it compares to	A fraction of a controller's salary, for a CFO function plus the software it runs on.
The portal	Custom-built for Benefit Cloud; your data is yours, exportable at any time.
Transparency	As discussed live: if you join Ramp via our partner link, you receive a $500 bonus and so do we. That's the whole arrangement.

§ 06 · To start

Three things from you, one from us

From your side

Reply “approved” to the proposal email — that's the whole signature ceremony (engagement letter follows for countersign)
Tyler: R&D credit formulas (by Jul 25 if we're keeping his own deadline)
Green light for the QBD → QBO migration + card admins & signers named

From ours

Kickoff Tuesday, July 28 — Ramp application and QBO migration plan in motion the same week
One open thread we'll close in week one: four unlabeled ACH debits of exactly $6,720 on First Citizens. Exactly the kind of thing the portal exists to catch.

Approve & book kickoff →

Questions first? Reply to the thread or grab time — we'll turn it around same day.

The finance function, installed. The judgment, on call.