You can find most of your company's revenue leakage in two working weeks. You don't need a consultant or new software. You need your leadership team, a few reports, and the patience to ask the same question twice.
This is the self-assessment I'd run if I were a CEO starting from zero. Each day covers one area, with one question for the person who owns it and one set of numbers to pull. By day ten you'll have a priced list of leaks, ranked by size.
If you haven't read it yet, start with What Is Revenue Leakage? for the definitions. This post is the practical part.
This framework is drawn from The Hidden Leak — the field guide for CEOs who want to find and close the money their business is already losing.
Before you start: three ground rules
Ask for numbers, not opinions. "Discounting is under control" is an opinion. "Average discount was 7.2% against a 5% policy" is a number.
Accept rough estimates. You're looking for orders of magnitude. If the true figure is somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000, that's enough to decide whether it matters.
Don't fix anything yet. The moment you start fixing, people stop telling you about the next problem. Finish the list first.
If your business runs across more than one country, run the exercise in each entity — Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam separately. The leaks are rarely the same in each place, and the biggest ones often sit in the handoffs between them.
The 10 days
Day 1 — Pricing and discounts (Sales)
Ask: "How much did we give away below list price last quarter, and who approved it?" Pull the last 50 deals with list price, contract price and approver. Calculate the total discount in dollars and the share that went above policy.
Day 2 — Unbilled work (Operations or Delivery)
Ask: "What did we deliver last quarter that the customer didn't pay for?" Pull change requests, extra visits, rush jobs and overtime logged against fixed-price work. Price it at your standard rates.
Day 3 — Invoicing (Finance)
Ask: "How many days, on average, between delivery and invoice?" Compare invoice dates with delivery or milestone dates. Count credit notes and re-issued invoices, and find out why each one happened. In Malaysia and Vietnam, your e-invoice records make this data much easier to pull than it used to be.
Day 4 — Collections (Finance)
Ask: "What is our real DSO, and who are our ten slowest payers?" Compare actual payment days with contract terms. Multiply the excess days by daily revenue to see how much cash is tied up.
Day 5 — Contracts (Legal and Sales)
Ask: "What did we pay in penalties, credits or free extensions this year?" Read your top ten customer contracts. List every clause that costs you money when something slips, including annual price-down clauses from large customers.
Day 6 — Rework and quality (Operations or Engineering)
Ask: "How many hours did we spend redoing work?" Pull rework hours, scrap, returns and bug-fix time. Use a fully loaded hourly rate, not the base wage. The Hidden Cost of Rework explains how to count it.
Day 7 — Customer profitability (Finance and Sales)
Ask: "Which customers would we lose money on if we counted everything?" Take your top 20 accounts. Subtract discounts, cost of delivery, support time and payment delays. Rank them by profit, not revenue.
Day 8 — Suppliers (Procurement)
Ask: "How much have our top five suppliers raised prices in two years, and did we pass it on?" Compare unit costs then and now. Check whether supplier SLAs were ever enforced.
Day 9 — Leadership time (CEO and direct reports)
Ask: "How much of our week goes to work that doesn't move revenue or margin?" Each leader reviews last week's calendar and marks status meetings, rework and firefighting. It's a soft number, but often the most revealing one.
Day 10 — Rank and price
Put every leak on one page: the leak, its estimated annual cost in dollars, who owns it, and how confident you are in the number. Sort by cost.
What the one-page summary should look like
Keep it simple. A list that fits on one page gets acted on. A 40-page report gets filed.
| Leak | Estimated annual cost | Owner | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discounts above policy | $540,000 | VP Sales | High |
| Slow collections (cash cost) | $280,000 | CFO | High |
| Rework in final assembly | $210,000 | Plant Manager | Medium |
| Waived rush fees | $95,000 | Head of Operations | Low |
*Illustrative figures for a company with around $40M revenue.*
You'll likely find that the top three leaks account for most of the total. That's normal, and those three are where you start.
Key Stat
In most companies, the top three leaks account for 70–80% of the total leakage. Fix those three properly before moving to the next set.
What you'll hear along the way — and what it usually means
Ten days of these questions will produce some predictable answers. Here is how I read them.
"We don't track that." This is the most useful answer you'll get. If nobody measures it, nobody is managing it, and it's probably bigger than you think.
"That's just how this industry works." Sometimes true. More often it means the leak has been there long enough to feel normal. Ask whether your best competitor has the same problem.
"It's a small amount." Ask for the number. Small per transaction often turns out to be large per year.
"That's not my department." Write this one down. Leaks that sit between two departments are usually the biggest, because neither side has a reason to fix them.
"Everything is on track." If you hear this from a subsidiary in another country, ask for the numbers behind it. In many teams across the region, people avoid bringing the boss bad news. The question has to make it safe to answer honestly.
Common mistakes CEOs make with this exercise
Delegating the whole thing. You can delegate the data gathering, but not the questions. People answer the CEO differently.
Turning it into a blame session. If the first person who admits a leak gets punished, nobody else will admit one. Thank people for bad news. You want more of it.
Stopping at the list. A priced list with no owners is just an expensive report. Every leak you choose to fix needs one owner, one metric and one date.
Trying to fix everything. Pick the three biggest. Close them properly. Then come back for the next three.
After day ten
By now you should have a clear view of where your company loses money, and a rough price for each leak. In most companies I've seen, the first pass alone finds enough to pay for the time spent many times over.
If the list is longer than you expected, or you'd like an outside view your team can't argue its way around, that's what our Executive Leak Assessment is for. It follows the same logic as this exercise, run independently over one to two weeks, for companies across Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Every leak is priced and checked against your own numbers.
Or request *The Hidden Leak* framework through our contact page. It includes the worksheets we use for each area.
About the book
*The Hidden Leak* by M.K. Hasan is the field guide behind this framework — written for CEOs of growing companies who want to find and close the money their business is already losing, before an investor, a buyer, or a cash crunch finds it for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I identify revenue leakage in my business?
Compare what you should have earned with what you actually collected, area by area: pricing, unbilled work, invoicing, collections, contracts, rework, customer profitability and supplier costs. Put a dollar estimate on each gap and rank them.
How long does a revenue leakage audit take?
A first internal pass takes about two working weeks. A deeper review with full data checks usually takes longer, depending on the size of the business and the state of its reporting.
Which department usually has the biggest revenue leaks?
It varies, but the largest leaks often sit between departments — for example between sales and delivery, or between delivery and invoicing — where no single team owns the outcome.
Do I need special software to find revenue leakage?
No. Your existing CRM, ERP and accounting reports are usually enough for a first assessment. Software helps later, to monitor leaks once you know where they are.
Should a regional group run this separately in each country?
Yes. Run it for each entity first, then look at the handoffs between them: intercompany pricing, shared customers and reporting to head office. That's where regional groups usually find leaks no single entity owns.
About the Author
M.K. Hasan
Founder, EVOSYST · Global CHRO & Strategic Advisor to CEOs
M.K. Hasan helps CEOs and Boards find the revenue their business is losing and get it back. He works across Strategy, People and Operations through focused diagnostic and recovery sprints.
Request an Executive Leak Assessment