Where they started
Meridian Trade Partners is a composite illustration of a mid-market PE platform operating 14 HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies across three regions. When they came in, the finance stack looked like most platforms of their size: each company had its own QuickBooks file (40+ across the portfolio), reporting was emailed as Excel attachments, and the GP's view of "how the platform is doing" was a manually assembled summary that was always six weeks stale by the time it landed in the inbox.
The integration project wasn't a technology problem. It was a data discipline problem — and a time problem. The team had done an initial RollForge integration on their flagship company and seen the live P&L dashboard in real time. The question was whether they could replicate that across 14 companies without a dedicated integration engineer.
The 100-day plan
They followed the RollForge 100-Day Integration Playbook almost exactly. The phases weren't invented — they reflect the actual order in which data infrastructure problems have to be solved if you want the result to be maintainable.
Data Plumbing — connect the sources
OAuth connections to all 14 QuickBooks accounts. Bank feed sync via Plaid on 8 of the 14 (the other 6 used manual bank statement upload). No chart-of-account normalization yet — just raw data flowing in. Day 14 checkpoint: every portco has at least one connected source, no manual re-export required.
KPI Normalization — agree on the formula before you benchmark
They locked three KPIs first: gross margin (revenue minus direct labor and materials), first-time-fix rate (from dispatch data), and cash runway (bank balance divided by 30-day average burn). Those three went into a shared definition document distributed to every GM. Day 30 checkpoint: at least 8 companies reporting the same gross margin formula.
Cadence + Reporting — automate what can be automated
RollForge anomaly alerts configured for every portco: revenue drop >15% MoM fires a notification. Weekly Monday Pulse emails started going to the GP and operating partners. Report templates standardized — every portco producing the same P&L format for lender use.
Board-Ready — financial packages on demand
Banker-ready loan packages for every portco — DSCR, add-backs, AR aging, executive narrative — generated in under a day. Board reporting shifted from a 3-week finance analyst project to a 20-minute export. Day 100 milestone: live demo to the LP advisory committee with real portfolio data in a single dashboard.
What actually changed (before / after)
These are the nine operational metrics Meridian tracked at Day 0 and Day 100:
The hard parts
Days 1–14 went faster than expected. The QBO OAuth flow is a two-click integration per company. The real friction was COA normalization — every company had invented its own account structure, and getting to a shared gross margin formula required agreement from 14 GMs about how to categorize materials vs. labor vs. subcontract. That's a people problem, not a software problem.
The anomaly alert calibration in Days 46–75 took longer than the playbook assumes. Revenue volatility varies by trade: HVAC is seasonal, plumbing is more flat. Thresholds that make sense for HVAC fire as false positives on plumbing. They ended up configuring per-company thresholds rather than a single platform-wide rule — a decision that added two weeks but eliminated noise in the weekly digest.
The loan package workflow was the biggest surprise. The team expected lenders to push back on an AI-generated executive narrative. They didn't. The narrative was accurate to the numbers, used the same language lenders expect (DSCR, add-backs, working capital cycle), and the fact that it updated automatically with fresh data meant the package was always current — which is rare in a typical lender conversation.
What Day 100 actually looked like
The LP advisory committee presentation ran off the live RollForge dashboard. No exported slide deck. No pre-built charts. The GP opened the browser, pulled up the portfolio view, sorted by EBITDA margin, and clicked into the two outlier companies for the drill-down. The questions from the committee were answered live — "what's the 90-day revenue trend for Company 7?" — by showing the anomaly feed, not by looking up a spreadsheet.
Day 100 Results
- 14 portcos live in a single portfolio view — no manual aggregation
- 6-week reporting lag reduced to zero — live data from all connected sources
- 9 KPIs standardized across the platform — same formula, every company
- Weekly Monday Pulse digest running for GP and two operating partners
- Banker-ready loan packages available on demand for any portco
- LP presentation ran entirely off live dashboard — no slides required
- First post-integration acquisition onboarded in 11 days (vs. 90-day previous)
What comes next
Meridian's next 100 days are focused on prediction, not reporting. They've built the data layer. Now they want revenue trajectory models 60 days out, scenario analysis for two potential acquisitions in their pipeline, and automated DSCR monitoring against their existing debt covenants.
All of that is already in RollForge. The infrastructure they built in the first 100 days is the prerequisite — without unified data, forward-looking models are guesses. With it, they're projections.
This is what 100 days of focused execution looks like.
If your platform has fragmented reporting, a manual board-pack process, or a reporting lag you've stopped counting — the path is documented. The software is ready.