Companies spend fortunes hunting for new revenue streams while millions leak out through broken processes every day. The problem isn’t usually technology or strategy. It’s in the handoffs between departments, the manual workarounds nobody talks about, and the shadow processes that develop when official systems don’t quite work. Shannon Noonan has made a career out of finding this lost money, and her track record speaks for itself.
Building Expertise Through Real-World Recovery
Noonan leads HiNoon Consulting after spending nearly two decades in revenue recovery, compliance, and audit work across companies like EMY, Silence, and Grand Telecommunications. She’s seen the same patterns repeat across different industries. “The biggest revenue gaps are often hidden in the everyday processes,” she notes. Her experience taught her that most companies look in the wrong places when revenue goes missing. While other consultants recommend expensive system overhauls, Noonan takes a different approach. She focuses on standardizing what’s already there, creating visibility where none existed before. Her methods consistently uncover substantial amounts of lost revenue without requiring major technology investments.
Start With Revenue Mapping
Her first step involves mapping the complete revenue cycle, but not in the way most people expect. “Every recovery journey starts by mapping the full revenue cycle from contract execution to cash in hand, also known as order to cash,” Noonan explains. “Don’t just look at your system. Look at what’s happening between manual workarounds, shadow processes, or misaligned data.”
This detailed examination often reveals surprising gaps. At one organization, her team identified over five million dollars in underbilled services. The issue wasn’t system failure but inconsistent logging practices and poor contract term verification. “We were able to increase revenue with the organization and help decrease manual processes,” she recalls. The fix involved standardizing how teams logged usage and cross-checking it with contract terms.
Standardize Handoffs Across Departments
Most executives assume revenue loss happens within individual departments, but Noonan’s experience tells a different story. “Revenue loss doesn’t usually happen in silos. It actually happens in the handoff process, from sales to billing, between service delivery and finance. That’s where uncertainty costs money.” These transition points between departments often lack clear protocols, creating gaps where revenue slips through. Her solution involves building standardized intake templates and approval checkpoints throughout the quote-to-cash cycle. Working with a technology company, she helped establish these protocols across all departmental handoffs. “In just six months, they were able to identify missed billing events by 40%. This allowed us to streamline the process and increase their revenue.” The improvement came from clarity, not complexity.
Make Recovery A Continuous Process, Not A One Time Fix
The biggest mistake companies make is treating revenue recovery as a one-time project. “Most companies treat revenue recovery as a special project. But when you embed these controls and dashboards into the regular cadence of business, it becomes proactive,” Noonan points out. Her approach integrates recovery processes into normal business operations. At one client, she introduced monthly variance checks and exception reports as part of the regular close cycle. The results came quickly. “We uncovered millions in recoverable revenue within the first quarter. We built a structure to catch the issues before they became too old and timed out. This allowed the company to increase their revenue and bill the customers for the time that they had spent.”
Noonan’s methodology rests on a simple but powerful principle. “It’s about standardization, consistency, clarity, accountability, and cash—not bureaucracy,” she explains. She’s learned that companies don’t need massive system changes to stop revenue leakage. They need processes clear enough that mistakes become obvious and consistent enough that nothing falls through the cracks.
Connect with Shannon Noonan on LinkedIn to explore practical strategies for preventing revenue leakage.
