Skip to content
Angelo Berlingieri
  • Root-cause analysis
  • Cross-team delivery
  • Intercompany accounting

A $500m problem, and the $50m+ that was ours to fix

Role
Financial Analyst
Company
Baker Hughes
When
2021 to 2022
Tools
BlackLine, Oracle
found company-wide
$500m
cleared
$50m+
of weekly calls
~1 year

Before

  • Invoices stuck and unpaid, hidden in a huge report
  • Nobody knew how big the problem was
  • No one owned the whole picture

After

  • $500m problem sized across the company
  • $50m+ in our business unit cleared
  • Every other share handed to its owner

01The problem

Baker Hughes moved to a new system for invoices between its own companies. Many of those invoices had small mistakes: the wrong company, the wrong order number, the wrong quantity. The system couldn't match them to an order, so they got stuck. On paper they still counted as money due, so the numbers looked fine. But nobody was ever going to pay them.

My job was to find out how big the problem was, and fix our share of it.

02What I did

  • Added it up. Every invoice in the company sat in one huge report that people checked one line at a time. Nobody had added it up before. I did, and found about $500m stuck company-wide, with more than $50m of it in our business unit.
  • Took our share, passed on the rest. $500m was far too much for one team. I took ownership of our $50m+ and told each business's finance leader about their part.
  • Ran the clean-up for a year. My manager handed me the project after its first few weeks. I ran weekly calls with the intercompany team in Budapest and Accenture's billing team.
  • Fixed the biggest first. Every invoice had to be opened and corrected by hand, so we started with the largest amounts. When cases stalled, I escalated to the local finance leaders.

03What changed

  • More than $50m of stuck invoices cleared.
  • Recognised with the Baker Hughes Care award in November 2022, shared with my manager and the Budapest team.
Care award · Baker Hughes · 2022
“...this team has been focusing on addressing related challenges and implementing sustainable solutions, which led to clearance of more than $50MM IC backlog issues.”
The invoices were on the books, so everyone was happy. But nobody was ever going to pay them.