Consultants live on planes. Travel sits near the top of the expense line, some client-billable, some the firm's own, and the GST on all of it leaks in exactly the way your diagnostics are built to catch. In someone else's business.
Volume out of proportion to headcount, a billable stream that muddies the claim, and the cobbler's-children problem, in its purest form.
Weekly client travel across the whole consulting staff produces thousands of tickets a year from a few hundred people, invoice volume that would make a manufacturer twice your size blink.
Client-billed travel and firm travel carry different GST treatment. Without clean reconciliation, the firm's own claimable credit gets lost inside the pass-through, miscounted in both directions.
Firms that would never let a client run an unreconciled cost line often run exactly one: their own travel GST. Everyone's too busy fixing other people's leaks to plumb their own.
A one-slide diagnostic of a firm's travel line. Familiar format. Unfamiliar subject. Watch the last bar.
You'd flag this in a client's cost base in the first week of a diagnostic. It's sitting in yours.
Every firm has a slide about capturing value hiding in plain sight. This is that slide, pointed inward, and the finding is already on your expense line.
Book a free reconciliation review, one quarter of engagement travel draws the waterfall.