💰 Finance · Case Study

Financial Performance
& Risk Analytics Suite

Automated P&L reporting, real-time cash flow monitoring, and risk signal dashboards for a multi-entity financial services firm — replacing a 5-day manual reporting cycle with instant executive visibility.

50%
Faster Reporting
85%
ETL Speed Gain
Auto
Risk Signal Detection
30%
Data Accuracy ↑

The Challenge

Financial reporting was entirely manual — analysts pulling data from multiple ERP modules, reconciling in Excel, and producing P&L summaries that took 5+ business days. Risk visibility was near-zero between reporting cycles, and variance analysis was reactive rather than proactive.

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Our Solution

We built PySpark ETL pipelines connecting all financial source systems, automated the entire report generation workflow, and deployed Power BI dashboards with real-time P&L, cash flow tracking, budget variance analysis, and automated risk signal alerting tied to configurable threshold rules.

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The Impact

Report generation time dropped by 50%. ETL processing speed improved by 85% through PySpark optimization. CFO and finance leadership gained same-day financial visibility. Risk signals now trigger automatically when KPIs breach defined thresholds — enabling proactive management.

P&L and Revenue
Intelligence

Phoenix Solutions — Financial Performance Suite · CFO Dashboard · FY2024
📊 P&L Overview
💵 Cash Flow
📉 Budget Variance
⚠️ Risk Signals
🏢 Entity View
📑 Reports
FY 2024
Q4 2024
Consolidated
Auto-generated · No manual intervention
Total Revenue
$12.4M
↑ 22.3% YoY
EBITDA Margin
28.4%
↑ 3.2pp
Operating Costs
$8.9M
↑ 8.1% — monitor
Free Cash Flow
$3.2M
↑ 41% YoY
Quarterly Revenue vs EBITDA (FY2024)
Q1 RevQ1 EBITQ2 RevQ2 EBITQ3 RevQ3 EBITQ4 RevQ4 EBIT
Revenue Mix by Segment
Lending 42%
Advisory 33%
Other 25%

Measurable Financial
Intelligence Gains

50%
Reduction in report generation time — days to minutes
85%
Faster ETL processing via PySpark optimization
30%
Data accuracy improvement through automated reconciliation
Real-Time
Risk signal detection replacing end-of-period discovery

Cash Flow & Risk
Monitoring Center

Financial Dashboard
$3.2M
Free Cash Flow
0 Active
Risk Flags
28.4%
EBITDA Margin
AUTO
Report Generation

Technologies Deployed

Power BIPySparkPythonSQL ServerAzure Data FactoryDAXPower QueryPandasFinancial Data ModelsAutomated Alerting

What the Numbers
Actually Mean

Headline percentages travel badly between organisations. Here is what each figure measured, and what it depended on.

1
50% faster reporting

Measured against the five-day manual cycle the engagement replaced. The saving is not evenly distributed: almost all of it comes from removing consolidation and reconciliation, which were people-time, rather than from faster queries. That matters when estimating your own case — if your close is slow because of approvals rather than assembly, expect a smaller number.

2
85% ETL improvement

This is processing time for the financial transformation workload, achieved by restructuring logic for PySpark rather than by adding infrastructure. Improvements of this size are typical where existing pipelines run sequentially; where they are already parallelised, the remaining headroom is considerably less.

3
Automated risk detection

Threshold breaches now trigger without anyone running a report. The value is in the gap it closes — previously risk was visible only at reporting cycles, so exposure that developed mid-period went unseen until after the fact.

How It Was
Actually Built

The five-day cycle was not caused by slow tooling. It was caused by consolidation being performed by people: analysts pulling from multiple ERP modules, reconciling in Excel, and resolving differences by hand each period. Any fix that left that step human would have saved hours, not days, so the consolidation logic was moved into the pipeline itself.

PySpark handles the extraction and transformation across the financial source systems, with Azure Data Factory scheduling and monitoring each run. Moving the heavy joins and aggregations into PySpark is where the 85% processing improvement came from — the same logic, executed in a framework designed for the volume rather than in sequential row-by-row operations.

The Power BI layer was then built around a deliberately narrow set of measures. A finance function can track hundreds; a dashboard that does gets opened once. P&L, cash position, budget variance and the configured risk thresholds each have one definition, documented, with drill-through to source so any number on the page can be traced back to the record that produced it.

How an Engagement
Like This Runs

Phase 1
Discovery & Scoping
Source systems mapped, metric definitions agreed, and the decisions the system has to support written down before anything is built.
Phase 2
Data Layer
Pipelines, transformations and the governed model — the part that determines whether everything above it is trustworthy.
Phase 3
Dashboard Build
Views built with the people who will use them, validated against the reports they replace.
Phase 4
Handover
Documentation, training and a model the internal team can extend without calling us back for every change.

What We Would
Do Differently

Every engagement teaches something. These are the decisions we would change if we started this one again.

We would run the parallel validation period longer. The automated output tied to the manual pack quickly, but confidence in a finance number is built over several cycles, not one, and a longer overlap would have made adoption easier rather than faster.

The risk thresholds were also configured before there was enough history to calibrate them, which produced early alert noise. Defining thresholds against observed variance rather than expected variance would have avoided that.

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