Case study · Reporting & data

Practice reporting the partners can trust.

A mid-sized accounting firm built its monthly board pack by hand. We replaced it with live firm, partner and division reporting that will not show a figure until it ties to the firm's own control totals.

01 The situation

The firm compiled its board pack by hand every month from spreadsheets and a reporting tool on its ledger. Every sheet was tied back to a control figure by hand.

The firm was also moving to a new cloud practice-management system, and wanted live reporting for partners instead of a monthly document.

The detail that decided the project: a meaningful share of the firm's revenue never touches the practice-management system. Any off-the-shelf dashboard for that system was structurally incapable of producing the pack.

02 The risk we were hired to avoid

A dashboard is easy to build. A dashboard a room of accountants will believe is not. Accountants reconcile for a living, and the first figure that disagrees with their own spreadsheet costs the whole system its credibility.

So the question was never "can we chart the data". It was "how does a partner know the chart is right".

03 How we approached it

  1. i

    Use the firm's own control totals as the gate

    Seven control totals, taken from the firm's own workbooks — debtors, ageing, work in progress and fee income across month, year and service line. No data is promoted to the reporting pages unless every one ties. The default tolerance is zero: out by a cent is a rejection, not a rounding note.

  2. ii

    Show the reconciliation, not just a green test suite

    A one-page reconciliation pack sets each of our figures beside the firm's, and says exactly where in the firm's own files the comparison figure was read. It reads "7 of 7". The firm can check it the same way it checked the old pack.

  3. iii

    Treat every quirk in the source files as a test

    Thirty-five data hazards were found in the firm's own spreadsheets and extracts. Each one carries a named test. Raw data is append-only, so a figure can always be traced back to what was loaded.

  4. iv

    Run it where the data already lives

    The system runs in the firm's own cloud tenant, with its data in Australia. Partners sign in with their existing Microsoft work accounts; nobody gets another password.

04 What the business got

  • Live reporting on real figures

    A firm page, a page for every partner and every division, plus data quality, invoices and debtors. Summing the partner pages reproduces the firm total, and each division ties to the figure the firm stated.

  • Errors found in the old process

    Building the pack in code surfaced problems the spreadsheets had been carrying: a write-off sign convention that was inverted, and inconsistently so; a latent formula bug; and a column-order reversal that silently flipped a variance.

  • Pages that open instantly

    The firm page went from 25.8 seconds to under a tenth of a second, with byte-identical output — the speed-up changed nothing a partner would see except the wait.

  • Failures that cannot hide

    One early deploy reported success while serving nothing, and one default date turned every tile blank without an error. Both were found and fixed before launch. A green run should mean the app answers, not just that a script finished.

05 Contact

Still building a monthly pack by hand? Reporting can prove its own figures, the way your team already does. Get in touch.

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