Transforming Financial Data into Strategic Insights
The Client
A manufacturing business with four business units, each running its own finance function and its own version of monthly reporting.
The Problem
One unit tracked margins by product line. Another tracked them by customer account and didn’t break out product-level numbers at all. A third had switched accounting software eighteen months earlier and still had two years of historical data sitting in the old format, unreconciled. When the CFO’s office wanted a company-wide profitability view for an upcoming investor update, the finance team spent close to a week stitching spreadsheets together manually, and the resulting numbers still carried enough caveats that the CFO presented them with a verbal disclaimer rather than full confidence.
What We Built
The first real task was less about dashboards and more about getting four finance teams to agree on what a “margin” meant in their consolidated reporting, since each unit had been calculating it slightly differently for years. Once that was settled, we built a pipeline pulling from each unit’s accounting system, including a one-off migration to bring the stranded historical data from the old software into the new structure.
On top of the consolidated layer, we built scenario modelling specifically because the CFO’s team wanted to stress-test a planned price increase against three different cost scenarios before the next budget cycle – something they’d previously done in a single static spreadsheet that took two people most of a week to update each time assumptions changed.
The Results
The next investor update went out with a single, fully reconciled profitability number instead of a disclaimer. During the standardisation process, the team also discovered that one business unit’s “margin” figure had been overstating profitability by roughly 3% for over a year, due to a cost allocation error baked into their old spreadsheet template – something nobody had caught because no one had compared it against the other units directly until now.
Why It Worked
Nobody needed a smarter financial model. They needed four finance teams to stop disagreeing, quietly, about what their own numbers meant. The technical build was almost the easy part once that alignment happened – most of the real work, and the real value, was in the unglamorous process of getting everyone to define things the same way before a single chart got built.