Automated Reporting
Software
Management reporting becomes unreliable when finance and operations rebuild the same measures from different exports. We connect the sources, define each measure once and record the checks and distribution around every report.
88%
OF AUDITED SPREADSHEETS CONTAIN ERRORS (PANKO)
46%
OF FP&A TIME ON DATA COLLECTION AND VALIDATION
One report
DEFINED END TO END
Why manual reporting costs more than it looks
The 2025 FP&A Trends Survey says 46% of FP&A time goes on data collection and validation. That's before anyone gets to the analysis.
It gets worse in Excel. Ray Panko's review of operational spreadsheet audits found errors in 88% of audited spreadsheets. JPMorgan's 2012 CIO losses topped $6bn; its management task force report described a VaR spreadsheet that divided by a sum instead of an average.
If your business runs on a spreadsheet someone rebuilds every Monday, you're paying that tax. It bites harder the bigger you get.
MONDAY-MORNING REPORTING
- Someone exports CSVs by hand
- VLOOKUPs nobody else understands
- Three teams, three definitions of revenue
- Broken pipeline, nobody notices until Friday
- Report arrives Tuesday, decisions made Monday
AUTOMATED REPORTING
- Sources connect once, sync every hour
- Metrics defined in one place, named and tested
- Everyone reads the same number for the same word
- Checks run on every refresh, alert if numbers look wrong
- Inbox at 07:00 Monday, signed PDF in the board pack
What an automated report needs
Sales pipeline, cash flow, ops KPIs, the FCA Consumer Duty board pack, the HMRC quarterly update. The wiring is similar. Once you can see the parts, you can build them once instead of rebuilding them every week.
Sources
Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Stripe, GoCardless, HubSpot, Salesforce, Shopify, your operational database. Connected once, kept in sync. No more weekly CSV runs.
Warehouse
Postgres, BigQuery or Snowflake, depending on size. One place every number lives. Your warehouse, your rules, your data.
Metrics
Revenue, gross margin, churn, utilisation. Defined once in dbt or SQL, named, tested. The same word means the same number across finance, ops and the board.
Checks
Did the sync finish? Are this week's numbers within tolerance of last week's? Any rows missing? If something looks wrong, the system pages someone before the report goes out.
Delivery
PDF in your inbox, dashboard in the browser, Slack message to ops, board pack on the share. Scheduled, signed, archived. The report goes out whether you're at your desk or not.
How we take it into live use
The source systems vary by company, but the work is familiar: collect the figures, reconcile them, calculate the metrics, publish the report and flag exceptions.
Fixed-scope phases, working reports, you own the warehouse and the code. We can hand it to your team or keep it running for you.
BOOK A REPORTING AUDITReporting audit
We inventory the reports, sources, definitions, recipients and manual effort. Finance and operations agree which report should become the controlled first version.
Plumb the warehouse
Connect Xero, Sage, HubSpot, Stripe, your ops database and anything else that holds a number you care about. Land it cleanly in Postgres, BigQuery or Snowflake. dbt models for the metrics. Tests on every pipeline.
Launch the first report
The one that hurts most. Usually the weekly board pack, the cash forecast or the ops scorecard. The Monday rebuilder gets that morning back from week one.
Add the rest, kill the old ones
Next report, then the next. Each one retires a spreadsheet. We add data-quality checks, anomaly alerts and an audit log so you can prove to HMRC, the FCA or your auditor exactly which number came from where.
Reports we can automate
These examples use different source systems, outputs and review rules.
Recruitment board pack.
Bullhorn, Xero and a placements database into one Monday PDF. Margin per consultant, fee run-rate, time-to-fill, debtor days. The report arrives at 07:00 with the checks already run.
Manufacturing cash forecast.
Sage 200, Unleashed, GoCardless and HSBCnet feeds into a rolling 13-week cash view. Sales, stock, direct debits and bank balances in one place.
FCA-regulated adviser report.
Outcomes data across price and value, products and services, consumer understanding and consumer support. Pulled from the back-office, reconciled, ready for the board's annual Consumer Duty review.
Regulatory reporting requirements
Regulated reporting is a bad place for last-minute exports. We build the pipelines so the numbers are ready when the deadline hits, not the night before.
HMRC MTD
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax
Quarterly updates through MTD-compatible software from 6 April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50k. The £30k tier follows from 6 April 2027, then £20k from April 2028.
FCA
RegData & Consumer Duty
Regulated firms file via RegData on the FCA's schedule. Consumer Duty requires the board, or equivalent governing body, to review and approve a report on retail customer outcomes at least annually.
ICO
UK GDPR accountability
Organisations with 250 or more staff must document their processing activities. Smaller organisations still need records for processing that's not occasional, includes special category or criminal offence data, or is likely to risk people's rights and freedoms.
SECR & ESOS
Energy & carbon reporting
Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting came into force on 1 April 2019 for quoted companies, large unquoted companies and large LLPs in scope. ESOS Phase 4 has a 5 December 2027 compliance deadline.
SRA
Accounts Rules
Authorised firms that hold or receive client money need accurate client accounting records. An accountant's report is due within six months of period-end, and a qualified report must be delivered to the SRA.
Companies House
CS01 & annual accounts
Every company must file a confirmation statement at least once a year, up to 14 days after the review period ends. From 18 November 2025, new directors need identity verification before appointment and existing directors confirm it with their next confirmation statement.
TPR
The Pensions Regulator
Employers have ongoing automatic enrolment duties, including re-enrolment and re-declaration. Pension schemes also have their own return and governance reporting, depending on scheme type.
Charity Commission
Annual return
Registered charities in England and Wales must file their annual return, or report income and spending, within 10 months of year-end. Audit is required above £1m income, or above £250k income where gross assets exceed £3.26m.
The report has to live beside the work
Digbeth Events combines booking, revenue and team measures in its operations dashboard. Leo Associates keeps project, supplier and finance records together so reporting does not start with several exports.
When this is worth discussing
We work best when there is a real operating problem, enough volume to measure and people from the affected teams who can make decisions.
Usually a good fit
- An established UK business, usually with annual revenue above £10m
- A repeated process with a known cost, delay, error rate or capacity problem
- A senior sponsor and a day-to-day owner who understand the work
- Access to the relevant staff, systems, sample records and security requirements
We may point you elsewhere
- A standard product already covers the process well
- The requirement is a one-off small build with no wider operating case
- There is no owner or access to the people and data needed to test the result
- The plan relies on AI making high-impact decisions with nobody responsible for review
Questions before connecting the systems
Would Power BI or Tableau be enough?
Yes. The main scope still needs to cover source connections, agreed definitions and monitoring when a sync fails. The reporting interface can then be Power BI, Metabase, a custom Laravel page or a scheduled PDF, depending on licensing and user needs.
We already have dashboards nobody opens.
Most companies do. Dashboards die when the numbers don't match what people see in the source systems, or when the dashboard exists but the decision still gets made off an exported CSV. We start by working out which reports drive a Monday-morning conversation, and we automate those. The unused ones get retired, not migrated.
How long does the first report take?
Timing depends on the sources and whether teams agree the definitions. Standard APIs are faster to connect than legacy systems, but the larger risk is automating a measure that finance and operations calculate differently.
Can the AI just write the report?
For the commentary, sometimes. For the numbers, no. Snowflake Cortex, Power BI Copilot and Databricks Genie are getting good at "ask the warehouse a question", but they still need a clean warehouse with tested metrics underneath. Air Canada lost a tribunal case in early 2024 after its chatbot gave wrong bereavement-fare advice. Numbers in a board pack need the same scepticism. We use AI where it earns its keep, deterministic SQL where the auditor will be reading.
Where does the data live?
Your warehouse, on your cloud account. Postgres for small footprints, BigQuery or Snowflake when volumes justify it, all UK or EU region by default. You hold the credentials. We can host it for you, or hand it over to your team and walk away.
What does it cost?
The audit is fixed-fee. A first report is scoped against the sources, definitions and delivery method. Later reports and support are quoted separately, while warehouse running costs depend on volume, refresh frequency and retention.
What if a pipeline breaks at 03:00?
It will, eventually. Xero changes a field, a key rotates, a CSV format moves a column. Every pipeline goes live with tests and alerts. If the Monday report isn't ready by 06:30, someone gets paged. The report either arrives correct or it arrives with a clearly-flagged "data delayed" banner. Never the silent wrong number.
Who owns the code?
You do. That includes the repository, warehouse and dbt models. Every metric is a named SQL model your team can read, edit and extend.
Talk to us about the report you keep rebuilding
Send us the current report, its sources, recipients and monthly effort. We will identify the first report worth automating and the data definitions that need agreement before work begins.