Technical debt
Your engineers say "technical debt". Your accountant sees nothing.
Debt that never appears on a P&L never gets paid down. The fix is not a rewrite. It is a price: what this debt costs you per month, in engineer hours, cloud spend, and missed releases.
Putting a number on it
Every debt item that matters shows up somewhere measurable: the feature that takes 6 weeks instead of 2, the incident that repeats quarterly, the system only one person dares touch, the cloud bill inflated by an architecture nobody chose on purpose. Technical debt has a monthly cost shows the method for reading it out of your delivery data and your bills.
What the ledger changes
Once the debt is priced, the conversation changes owner. It stops being an engineering complaint and becomes a line the CEO can rank: this item costs EUR 15 000 a month and takes six weeks to retire, that one costs EUR 2 000 and can wait. Some debt is worth keeping. The report says which, in writing, so the decision is yours and documented.
Where it fits
The debt ledger is part of the 3-week diagnosis, and the same lens runs the cloud cost review and the technical due diligence. Same method, different buyer.