Month-End Costs You
Three Days of a Good Analyst
Exports, reconciliation, formatting, distribution. We automate the parts that are data assembly and leave the parts that are judgement — with validation that stops a wrong pack shipping on time.
Symptoms
Where the three days
actually go
Two to three hours, entirely automatable, and the easiest part to fix.
Six to ten hours. The largest automatable block and where the return concentrates.
Formatting work that has been done identically for years.
Four to eight hours — and not an automation problem. No tool fixes a colleague who submits late.
When they are on leave, month-end slips. Nothing is documented because it was never anyone's job.
A subsidiary silently missing from an on-time pack is worse than a late one.
Why It Happens
The hard part is not
the automation
Extracting and transforming data is routine engineering. The part that consumes a project is reconciliation logic, because it encodes judgement that currently exists only in somebody's head.
Ask your finance person what they do when the ERP and the bank disagree by 400. You will get something like: under 500 and it is timing, so it carries; over 500 they investigate; an exact round number is usually a manual journal. None of that is written down anywhere, and it is the actual content of the process.
That conversation is the project. Three days of it, documented properly, and the build is straightforward. Skip it and you automate the easy sixty per cent while somebody still does the hard forty by hand — which saves far less than promised and is how these projects get a reputation for underdelivering.
We will also tell you when automation is the wrong answer. If the pack takes three days because two are spent chasing other departments, a deadline change delivers more than we would.
What We Do
What we build
and hand over
Every step timed and written down, including the judgement calls. This is the deliverable clients end up valuing most.
The classification logic made explicit: what is timing, what needs investigating, what holds the pack entirely.
Automated pulls from ERP, banking, CRM and anything else, with retry logic and monitoring.
Row counts, control totals, required entities reporting. If a check fails the run stops and a named person is told, rather than publishing.
The pack generated and delivered, with the summary posted wherever your team already works.
Two full cycles alongside the manual process, reconciled until they tie exactly.
Engagement
Timeline
and Cost
A typical finance pack with three or four source systems is a three to five week engagement. The second automation is considerably cheaper than the first, because the extraction, validation and alerting plumbing already exists. Against three days a month of a qualified person's time, payback is usually inside a year.
FAQ
Questions
We Get Asked
Whichever fits your stack: n8n self-hosted for mixed systems with no per-task fee, Power Automate for Microsoft-only environments, Python with a scheduler for heavy transformation, Azure Data Factory at volume. What matters more than the tool is that the logic is version controlled and readable by someone other than its author.
The pipeline fails loudly rather than publishing something wrong, and a named person is alerted. That is the whole point of the validation gate. Silent partial success — a pack that arrives on time missing a subsidiary — is the failure mode we design against.
No, and any consultant promising that is selling something. It replaces data assembly. Review, commentary and judgement stay human, and the point is that your analyst spends the month analysing rather than copying.
That is the intent. The workflow logic is visual or version controlled depending on the tool, documented, and we train a named person on your side. If handover means a system only we can change, you have bought a dependency rather than an asset.