The useful part is what each one refuses to do.
Every one of them is running in the business it was built for. The six you can open here are our own copies, loaded with invented records, so you can drive one without touching anyone real. Every company below is named.
It stops for a late live bird instead of guessing.
Customers get the answer straight away, from the shop’s own records. Anything about a live bird, and anyone upset, goes to a person instead.
It doesn’t clear conflicts. A solicitor does.
Every name on an enquiry is checked against everything the firm holds, and against who owns whom. The system writes down the route it followed and a solicitor decides.
It stops the invoice and attaches the reason.
The clean ones post themselves. The rest stop, with the reason attached and the question for the client already written.
It flags applicants. It rejects nobody.
Every document is read for what a fast reader would miss, and anything found goes to a person. Nobody is turned down by the system.
It won’t reconcile for you. It names the stage that broke.
Every stage counts what it took in and what it passed on. A shortfall shows up the same day, at the stage where it happened.
It won’t book what it shouldn’t, and it records why.
The rules run before an appointment exists. Anything it will not book is refused, with the reason written down.
Every delivery carries two numbers: what the note said, and what somebody counted.
Everything is filed from the phone the team already carries. Every delivery records what the note said and what somebody counted, and is paid on the count.
All seven have been measured, and every figure is published with what it does not say.
Of the eight firms we checked, not one states the method or the limits behind any number it advertises. Where a figure came off our own test rather than the client’s own records, it says so.
Birdy Shop
100% — Of the messages that had to reach a person, on sixteen written after the code was frozen. What it does not say: three times in fourteen it fetched someone who was not needed.
9% — The same sixteen messages, before it read them for meaning. Matching words caught one in eleven.
60 hours — A month back at the shop, over more than a year of running. Two people spent the first hour of every morning, seven days a week, on the same order questions; about three in four now answer themselves from the shop’s own records. What it does not say: nobody has counted how often a customer had to ask again.
2 — Times a live bird ran late and the fifteen-minute rule fired, over more than a year. A named person took it inside the fifteen minutes both times. For a parcel the same delay is a four-hour handover.
Foundation Legal Advisors
100% — Precision, on 1,128 name pairs across 27 entities in our own fixture. Zero false merges. What it does not say: how many it missed.
86.2% — Recall at pair level; 85.7% by entity. Published per variation class, so a class handled badly cannot hide inside an average.
3 — Kinds of hidden link it has found that searching for names would not have reached, over more than a year, from 20 to 100 new enquiries a month — one through ownership, one through a person sitting on two boards, one through a company’s former name. What it does not say: how many times each kind has happened, or how many it missed.
0 — Conflicts decided by the system. It runs first, a solicitor still searches, and a solicitor still decides. It rarely raises something that turns out to be nothing.
Ledger Solutions
4 in 5 — Invoices that now post with nobody watching, out of 200 to 600 a month. What it does not say: nobody has counted what got through when it should have stopped.
3 — Duplicate invoices caught in the last year, the largest more than $1,000. Each one would have been paid twice. It also stops on totals that do not add up, on suppliers the practice has no record of, and on an invoice that adds up perfectly and is wrong on its face — a description that does not fit the supplier. That last one is the only catch the arithmetic cannot make.
Nextgen Recruiter
6+ — Applicant documents carrying text that was in the file and not on the page, over more than a year, from a pile of 200 to 1,000 a month. Two kinds have turned up, and neither is keyword stuffing: a whole job advert pasted in invisibly so the document matches it perfectly, and — at least once — instructions addressed to whatever software read the file, which were reported rather than obeyed. What it does not say: how many carried something the check does not look for.
0 — Applicants rejected by the system, ever. Everything it finds goes to a person. In one case a person then decided not to put that candidate forward — that decision was theirs.
Streetwear Classy
49 — Pieces traced between cutting and packing — 7.21% of the stock. What it does not say: this is one run, the one we tracked.
Elite Clinic
10+ — Bookings refused or stopped under the rules, over six months, from 200 to 800 enquiries a month. Two different refusals, not one: outright on the aesthetic side, and sent to a clinician on the dental side. The clinic agreed with almost all of them. What it does not say: nobody has counted what it let through that it should have stopped.
2 — Rules the clinic asked us to loosen after the first version. We loosened one and told them plainly why not the other. The system has never decided whether a patient can consent.
S J Construction
200 — Bags of cement on the supplier’s delivery note.
194 — Counted off the truck. The delivery is valued on this one.
Every price is published.
15 of them, from $390, and nothing on request.