The challenge: five days lost, every single month
At a firm like this, each month-end the finance team pulls data from a freight management system, an accounting package, fuel-card statements, and a tangle of supplier spreadsheets — then reconciles it all by hand. The process swallows five working days, introduces copy-paste errors that take even longer to chase down, and leaves no time for the analysis leadership actually wants: margin by route, cost per shipment, where money is quietly leaking.
It isn't a people problem. It's a plumbing problem. The data exists; it just lives in disconnected systems with no reliable way to bring it together.
The approach: a short discovery, then a fixed-scope build
We'd start with a paid discovery sprint: two weeks to map every data source feeding the close, assess data quality, and agree exactly what "done" looks like. That produces a costed, fixed-scope plan — no open-ended retainer, no surprises. You'd know the price and the outcome before a line of the build begins.
Then we'd build to that scope:
- Integrate the freight system, accounting package, and fuel-card feeds through their APIs, replacing manual exports.
- Automate the reconciliation logic — matching transactions, flagging exceptions, and surfacing only the items a human actually needs to review.
- Ship a governed Power BI "close pack": a single, trusted view of the month with drill-downs by route, client, and cost centre.
- Add access controls and an audit trail so every number can be traced back to its source.
The outcome we'd aim for: an afternoon, not a week
The goal of this approach is to take the monthly close from five days to a single afternoon. Reconciliation that once relied on manual matching runs automatically, with exceptions flagged for review rather than hunted down. Most importantly, the finance team aims to win back roughly a week of capacity every month — capacity that can go into forecasting and margin analysis instead of data wrangling.