An invoice is a wonderfully unforgiving document. It asks for money on a particular date. The consulting report that accompanies it can be considerably less precise about when anything will improve. Practus has built its business around closing that gap. Before an assignment begins, the firm says, it commits to a measurable return on the client’s fee. That puts an awkward, useful question in the room: which number will actually change?
- Finance expertise, followed through into operations and technology.
- Implementation teams and fees linked to agreed outcomes.
- A practical lesson for buyers: define the result before buying the work.
A business hiding inside the first business
The founders did not begin with today’s broad consulting offer. Deepak Narayanan and S. Venkat, cousins with backgrounds at EY and Hines respectively, started WealthTree Advisors to help foreign businesses establish themselves in India. A 2015 account put their initial savings investment at about ₹1 lakh. Then recession in the West and stalled policymaking in India weakened the demand they had expected.
Working with Indian businesses revealed another market: finance functions that had fallen behind their owners’ needs. The same account dates MyCFO’s launch to December 2010. By the 2014-15 financial year, that service generated 90 percent of WealthTree’s revenue. The founders had found a more immediate problem while pursuing a different one.
The monthly CFO, with a scoreboard
MyCFO offered budgeting, cash-flow management, ERP implementation and interim finance leadership. The early commercial arrangement was concrete: a monthly retainer, with some payment linked to financial milestones. A company could obtain help while searching for a permanent CFO, or strengthen a finance department that already had one. The title mattered less than the missing capability.
In July 2015, MyCFO announced ₹6.21 crore in Series A investment led by Monik Koticha. The stated uses were senior talent, technology and geographical expansion. Those choices explain the economics of the service. Experienced people had to be available; repeatable work had to become easier to deliver. By September 2021, MyCFO, MyCXO and Practus were consolidated under the Practus name. The work had grown beyond its original label.
“We focus on getting things done rather than just giving advice.”
S. Venkat, describing MyCFO in 2015
Follow the money out of finance
Today, Practus occupies the territory between management advice and the work of putting a changed business into operation. Its finance services address reporting, cash conversion and profitability. Its digital practice covers ERP implementation, business intelligence and robotic process automation. Its analytics service goes through assessment, design, testing, training and support after launch. The deliverable is meant to survive contact with the people using it.
That breadth makes sense when a financial problem crosses departmental boundaries. A late payment may involve a sales agreement, a disputed deduction, warehouse records and a finance team trying to reconcile them. Buying another dashboard will help only if the information underneath it can answer the question. Practus’s proposition connects the diagnosis with changes to the process and the tools.
The firm serves owner-managed businesses, investor-backed companies and multinationals. Its website reports more than 1,500 clients across over 20 countries. A public Piramal testimonial describes work on deductions, controls and reporting. For smaller businesses, the attraction is access to capability. For larger ones, it is additional capacity to tackle a specific mess without waiting for the whole organization to reorganize.
Nine percent of claims. Nearly half the value.
One Practus case involving a mid-sized US pharmaceutical manufacturer makes the method unusually visible. In the diagnostic, nine percent of open chargeback claims accounted for 49 percent of their value. Treating every claim as equally urgent was a poor allocation of effort. The useful first move was sorting the work.
The engagement moved into cleanup of a $4.3 million aged-receivables backlog. Practus says 84 percent, approximately $3.6 million, was resolved, mapped for write-offs or placed into recovery action plans. Those categories matter. The figure describes progress through a backlog; it does not mean $3.6 million arrived in the bank. Manual reconciliation then gave way to dashboards intended to sustain the discipline. The software followed the control problem.
The handover belongs in the plan
Practus describes its delivery model as Build-Operate-Transfer. Read literally, it poses three different tests. Can a team establish the capability? Can it run that capability alongside the client? Can the client take it over? The third question gives the assignment an ending more useful than the departure of the consultants.
Alternatives include a large advisory firm, an outsourced CFO provider, an ERP specialist or an internal hire. Practus’s stated distinction is combining implementation with an agreed financial outcome. In a 2023 interview, its North American business leader also described a technology-agnostic approach and delivery using both onshore and offshore teams. That is a service model, rather than a software subscription with a single product underneath every assignment.
The company’s Gurukool learning program covers Power BI, advanced Excel, leadership and other skills. That detail is more consequential than it sounds. A firm selling implementation needs people who can move between a financial question and the tools that answer it. Training is part of maintaining the thing the customer is buying.
Write the result into the brief
A buyer can copy the discipline without copying the company. Agree on the baseline, define the improvement, assign someone to implement it and decide how to measure it. Distinguish cash collected from balances reviewed, and recurring savings from a one-time cleanup. Those are practical implications of Practus’s approach, rather than promises about any particular engagement.
The arrangement needs conditions: access to reliable data, cooperation across teams and agreement on what counts as success. Where those are absent, a fee multiple can become another argument over a spreadsheet. Practus’s more interesting proposition is the obligation beneath the number. The consultant and the client need a shared definition of finished.