Audit / Health Check
What this is
A four-week diagnostic. Bring Canary in to ingest your transaction history, inventory positions, and AP records. Surface the leaks — phantom inventory, uncaptured discounts, vendor compliance gaps, shrink attribution holes, OTB drift. Output is a KPI baseline and a remediation roadmap.
This is the lowest-commitment entry to the platform. No long-term commitment. No platform deployment. The merchant gets a quantitative answer to operational questions that have been instinct.
Who it's for
- Retailers who aren't ready to swap stacks but suspect they're leaving money on the table.
- CIOs preparing a transformation case who need a third-party operational read.
- Boards looking for objective baseline metrics for a strategic review.
- Lenders or insurers requiring an operational health assessment as part of due diligence.
What changes
A quantitative answer to questions that have been instinct.
| Question that was instinct | Answer the audit produces |
|---|---|
| How much shrink is fixture write-off vs. theft vs. process error? | Attributed shrink breakdown by category, with specific events flagged |
| How much promotional demand is bleeding into baseline forecast? | Forecast accuracy delta with and without promotional isolation |
| How many OTB overruns happened last quarter without flagging? | Variance log with magnitude and recovery options |
| How many invoices are paying past discount because the match queue is backed up? | Discount capture rate, with deferred-payment value computed |
| Which vendors are leaking the most through missed chargebacks? | Vendor compliance scorecard with specific deduction opportunities |
| Where is labor cost per transaction outside benchmark? | Labor efficiency by store, shift, and employee tier |
What stays the same
The merchant's stack. Team. Cadence. There is no platform commitment from the audit alone.
Starting move
Two-day kickoff to scope the data ingest. The audit team works with the merchant's IT to extract twelve months of transactions, inventory snapshots, and PO/ASN/invoice records. Two weeks of analysis. One week of writeup. One week of remediation roadmap workshop.
Engagement timeline
| Week | Activities | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Kickoff; data ingest scoping; system access requests; stakeholder interviews | Data ingest plan; signed engagement brief |
| Week 2 | Data extraction; classification; quality verification; initial dashboards live | Baseline KPI dashboard (read-only) |
| Week 3 | Analysis; leak identification; opportunity sizing; vendor scorecard generation | Findings draft; vendor opportunity ranking |
| Week 4 | Remediation roadmap workshop; final report; conversion-path discussion | Final report; remediation roadmap; recommended next steps |
The output is the merchant's. The engagement closes cleanly. There is no ongoing dependency unless the merchant chooses to convert.
Conversion path
If the audit surfaces enough opportunity to justify it, transformation is the natural next step. The audit data is already in the platform — the transformation engagement starts from the baseline already produced. Most merchants who run an audit and find more than ~3% of revenue in addressable leak convert within 90 days.
If the audit does not surface enough to justify transformation, the merchant has a documented baseline they can reference for vendor renegotiations, lender conversations, or future strategic reviews. The output retains value regardless of the conversion decision.
Pricing posture (placeholder — under negotiation per engagement)
Audit engagements are scoped per merchant size and complexity. The four-week diagnostic produces a discrete deliverable; pricing reflects that.
Related
- Transformation mode — the natural next step when the audit surfaces enough opportunity
- Why Canary — the framework the audit applies to the merchant's data
- Proof — anonymized audit examples and outcome ranges