Bear Consulting Services examines one defined area of your Unit4 Business World system across six assessment domains, from configuration drift to cloud readiness. The result is three documents, each written for a different reader.
The free Unit4 HR and payroll health check: twelve questions on the same six domains, scored on the page.
The X-Ray establishes what is in the system before any commitment. A long-running Unit4 system collects configuration changes, unresolved defects and processes nobody wrote down.
The report is written for your leadership team to act on and for your Unit4 team to work from.
The pattern is described in configuration debt in a long-running Unit4 system. How each finding is validated is set out in the Embedded Intelligence Method.
Each domain is examined from the live configuration, not from documentation.
What changed since go-live, who changed it and on whose authority, traced through the live configuration down to the attribute sets, value lists and flexi fields nobody now owns.
One list of open defects in calculation, workflow, integration and reporting, ranked by severity, each with its root cause. Ghost tasks, bypassed approvals and missed routing included.
Roles, access and segregation of duties tested against the approvals believed to be in place: role-based menu access, substitutes and proxies, user recertification, change governance and direct table edits.
Workflow rules, approval chains, scheduled processes, alerting, custom forms and integrations, written down as they run today and traced from the live configuration.
What the in-house team can and cannot do unaided, and what closes the gap, tied to the effort and risk in the roadmap.
Smart client dependency mapped against the current release: which processes still need it, the web client equivalent for each, and what needs remediation or data cleanse before a migration decision.
Where AI does the work. The diagnostic queries, the SQL evidence pack and the illustrated procedure manuals are produced through AI tooling the consultant has built and operates. Every finding is validated against the live system before it enters the report. PolicyAI is a separate product and forms no part of the X-Ray.
Three public sector engagements that worked the same way: evidence from the live system first, decisions second.
A council payroll ran multiple pay entities, a schools payroll included, with manual effort nobody had mapped. The review mapped the workflows, specified the fixes and sequenced them into a phased roadmap with consultancy estimates.
As test manager on a council's major-version HR and payroll upgrade, the consultant wrote the acceptance strategy, built a reusable script library and ran the testing in phases. The project board received defect status on a dated cadence and a data-driven recommendation, and accepted the upgrade on evidence.
A police force's operational database had to move into a new system without loss, duplication or silent transformation. The validation and reconciliation were written and run category by category. It met the requirements and timescales, and the board saw defect discovery and fix rates throughout.
Each of the three is written for a different reader.
Findings and priorities first. The evidence sits underneath.
Configuration inventory, workflow architecture, defect register, control map and schema annotations. The team can act on it without the consultant.
Every finding ranked by risk and effort, then sequenced: what the in-house team can fix, what needs specialist help and what waits for the next major programme.
The SQL evidence pack and diagnostic queries are handed over for the in-house team to re-run. They run again without the consultant.
Timing and access are agreed before work starts.
The consultant works from read-only access to your Unit4 system and interviews the HR, payroll, finance and systems people who run it.
The analysis covers system tables, workflow, scheduled processes and controls. Each finding is traced from the data to the decision it affects.
Written together, reviewed with you and handed over as one set, with the SQL evidence pack the in-house team can re-run.
Read-only access shows the current configuration and the history the system retains. Who changed what, and who approved it, depends on the records kept. A change made before that history, or outside the tracked route, may leave no trail.
Where evidence is missing, the report says so. It infers nothing and treats no area as clean.
Every X-Ray starts with a 30-minute call.
On the call the consultant asks what is drifting and gives you the fee and dates.