In a great many small Romanian companies the monthly trial balance travels a short and predictable route. The accountant prepares it, the deadline is met, the file is archived, and nobody opens it again until the following month. The figures are accurate and the returns are on time, yet the owner still cannot say which of five product lines actually pays for itself, or whether there will be enough cash in March, when salaries, VAT and a supplier instalment fall in the same week.
That gap between compliance and decision-making is the territory of the business consulting service listed by REALCONT®, a Bucharest accounting firm operating under the legal entity REALCONT BH SRL. According to information published on its site, the company has been active since April 2004 and offers thirteen services grouped into four areas: accounting and audit, payroll and human resources, tax and business consulting, and legal services delivered through a collaborating law office. Business consulting begins where the reporting obligations end.
What the service actually covers
The firm describes the service with a defined scope. Based on the presentation published by the company, the business consulting work is built around a set of deliverables:
- a financial diagnosis of the company’s current position;
- an annual budget and a twelve-month cash flow forecast, with tracking of the variances against actual figures;
- profitability analysis by product, by line of activity and by client;
- a management dashboard built on five to seven indicators;
- a business plan and the supporting documentation required by banks, investors or financing programmes;
- a restructuring and recovery plan where the situation calls for one.
What connects them is that none requires data the company does not already possess. Invoices, bank statements, payroll registers and the monthly trial balance are produced anyway, for reasons of law. The consulting work re-reads them with a different question: not whether the numbers are correctly recorded, but what they say about the next twelve months.
Diagnosis before forecast
The service description published by REALCONT® lists a financial diagnosis ahead of the budget and the forecast. Before any budget is drafted, the current position is examined — how liquidity has behaved over recent months, how receivables and payables are ageing, what the structure of fixed and variable costs looks like, and where the margin has drifted compared with the previous year.
That order matters more than it may appear. A budget built on an unexamined base reproduces whatever distortion is already there: a client who is habitually late with payments is projected as if they were not, an overhead that quietly doubled is carried forward as normal. The diagnosis is where such items surface, and where it becomes clear whether a forecast is realistic at all.
The service sits within the same portfolio as the firm’s accounting work, and it draws on the same evidence base that supports the statutory filings — the returns listed on its site, D100, D300, D394, D112 and the Declarația unică, the single tax return filed by individuals, together with RO e-Factura, e-TVA and SAF-T D406 reporting. The full range of services is set out on the English section of the site published by REALCONT®, addressed to foreign-owned companies and local subsidiaries of international groups.
Budget and cash flow: two different questions
Managers frequently treat the budget and the cash flow forecast as one exercise. The firm’s service description keeps them apart, for a practical reason: a profitable year and a difficult month are entirely compatible. A company can close December with a healthy result and still struggle to pay in September, because invoices issued in June are collected in October while the salaries and contributions behind them were paid on time.
The annual budget answers the question of whether the business model works over a full cycle. The twelve-month cash flow forecast answers a narrower and more urgent one — when the money physically arrives and when it physically leaves. The variance tracking that the company includes in the service is what turns both documents from a one-off planning exercise into a monthly instrument: the plan is compared with what actually happened, and the difference is explained rather than absorbed.
Which product, which client, which line
Profitability analysis by product, activity line and client is, in practice, the part that changes decisions most often. A company-level margin is an average, and averages hide the two cases that matter: the line that carries the business and the line that quietly consumes what the first one earns.
The exercise involves allocating indirect costs, which is where judgement enters. Salaries of staff working across several activities, rent, software subscriptions and transport rarely belong to a single line. How they are distributed determines the result, so the method has to be stated and kept consistent between periods. Done properly, the analysis can show that a large client generates volume at a margin that no longer covers the servicing effort, or that a small line with modest turnover is the one holding overall profitability together.
Five to seven numbers instead of forty
The dashboard described by the firm is short: five to seven indicators. A report with forty metrics tends to be read once and then set aside, while a handful of figures reviewed every month becomes a habit — and habits catch a deterioration early.
Which indicators belong in the set depends on the business. A construction company watching work in progress, a HoReCa operation watching food and labour cost as a share of turnover, and an IT services firm watching billable utilisation are not looking at the same numbers, even if the underlying accounting is identical. Commerce, services, IT, construction, HoReCa and manufacturing are among the sectors the firm lists in its client base.
Documents that leave the company
A separate part of the service concerns material read by outsiders — a business plan and financing documentation prepared for banks, investors or funding programmes. Here the requirement is less about internal insight and more about format, assumptions and the coherence between projections and the historical figures any analyst checks first. In the firm’s service description this documentation appears alongside the diagnosis and forecast work, within the same consulting engagement rather than as a stand-alone product.
Where the numbers meet the tax question
Business decisions in Romania rarely stay clear of tax consequences. A change in the shareholder remuneration mix, crossing the VAT registration threshold, or a shift between the micro-enterprise regime and corporate profit tax all move the projected result. The firm treats these as adjacent services: alongside business consulting it lists tax analysis, twelve-month tax planning, written tax opinions and support during ANAF inspections, described for international clients on the page covering tax consulting and ANAF support. Tax consulting is also available on its own, without an accounting contract.
The people behind the analysis
The management structure presented on the site places Florin Mihalcea as Chief Executive Officer and Administrator, responsible for the firm’s strategy, tax consulting for key clients, the relationship with ANAF and representation during inspections. Luiza Mantu, as Chief Financial Officer, is presented as responsible for the organisation of bookkeeping and reporting, the internal double-checking procedures, audit engagements, financial analysis and the tax calendar. The team includes chartered accountants who are members of CECCAR, the Romanian professional body, and the firm states that its activity is covered by professional indemnity insurance.
The firm was founded by Reasilvia Mihalcea (1966–2023), an economist who served as General Manager for close to two decades. The REALCONT® brand is registered with OSIM under filing M 2023 06702 of 11 July 2023.
Practical details published by the firm
The office is at Calea Floreasca no. 169, Sector 1, Bucharest, with working hours Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 (UTC+2). The company states that it works fully online with clients across Romania at the same fees as for Bucharest-based ones, and that each client has a dedicated consultant reachable by phone, e-mail or WhatsApp rather than a ticketing system. Starting fees are published on the site: from 70 euro per month for a PFA, the Romanian self-employed status, and from 145 or 170 euro per month for a company without or with a VAT number. The prices are quoted in euro, net of VAT, and invoiced in lei at the exchange rate agreed in the contract. For companies with foreign shareholders, the firm mentions monthly reporting delivered in English.
For a business owner, the practical test of all this is simple enough: whether, at the end of a month, the trial balance leads to a decision or only to a filing.
