Your week starts with exports, paste-special and a VLOOKUP that broke again over the weekend.
You assemble the same weekly report from five downloads and email it with a date in the file name.
The owner wants a KPI sheet every Monday, and building it is a Sunday-evening job.
Excel is the reporting system, and nobody has time to make it reliable.
Numbers from finance-team surveys — the problem is rarely Excel itself, it is the hours of copying and checking around it.
of business spreadsheets used for decisions contain errors, across 35 years of published studies.
Frontiers of Computer Science, 2024 ↗a week of skilled finance staff time goes into spreadsheet work; 41% of FP&A processes are still manual.
DataRails, survey of 200 CFOs ↗of FP&A time is spent collecting data and 33% on administration; only 25% is left for analysis.
AFP / APQC, via Vena ↗of CFOs name finding and fixing errors as their biggest manual problem.
DataRails, survey of 200 CFOs ↗of finance leaders call inadequate systems and tools the department’s main challenge.
AFP / APQC, via Vena ↗a week spent by half of finance professionals searching documents for information before analysis can start.
Hebbia ↗Put your monthly volume into the calculator and see hours and dollars.
Excel automation replaces the weekly routine behind every management report — export five CSVs, paste them into last period’s workbook, clean the dates and names, refresh the pivots, hope the formulas held, check the totals, write comments and email a dated copy — with a workflow that does the routine on a schedule. Finance teams spend far more time collecting and checking data than analysing it, and most of that work is the same every week. That is the part an automated reporting flow removes.
We build automated reports in Excel around the workbook you already have rather than a BI platform you have to migrate to. Data is pulled from QuickBooks Online, Xero, HubSpot, Stripe, bank feeds and ad accounts through their APIs, cleaned by rules written in a mapping table your team controls, and written into your template through the Microsoft Graph API. Control totals are compared with the source system before anything is sent; a mismatch holds the report and alerts the controller. A language model drafts the variance comments and an analyst edits them.
Automated reporting in Excel means the Monday report is in the inbox at 08:00 with the totals already reconciled, and the analyst’s morning goes into reading the numbers rather than assembling them. Format changes in a source stop the run instead of silently corrupting a tab. Definitions, judgement and the final word on every comment stay with finance.
The run path of one scheduled report. Each report runs on its own; a person reads the comments and approves anything the checks flag.
A schedule starts each report; the same path can be started by a new CSV in a mailbox or a SharePoint folder.
Fetches the period’s data from QuickBooks Online or Xero, HubSpot or Salesforce, Stripe, Google Ads and Meta through their APIs.
Python with pandas fixes dates and currencies, removes duplicates and maps names through a mapping table your team maintains.
Bank statements and supplier PDFs that arrive as documents are read by OCR and a language model into rows with the same columns.
If a source adds, renames or drops a column, the run stops before anything is written and a person gets the diff.
Copies the master workbook for the period in SharePoint or OneDrive through the Microsoft Graph API — your tabs, formulas and charts stay as they are.
Writes the clean rows into the data sheets with openpyxl; pivot tables and formulas recalculate on open.
Compares the report’s control totals — revenue, cash, headcount — with the source systems.
Matching reports go on; a mismatch sends the figures and the gap to the controller in Teams and holds the send.
A language model receives the variance table and writes plain-English explanations of the biggest movements, citing the rows they came from.
The analyst gets the workbook and the draft comments in Teams or Slack and edits them before anyone else sees the report.
For each recipient list, exports PDF or XLSX, sends by Outlook or Gmail, posts the summary in Teams and saves a dated version in SharePoint.
Sets alert rules on the updated data — cash below a floor, pipeline below target — and messages the owner when one is crossed.
Typical minutes per report in a small finance team. Your own numbers go into the calculator below.
Based on 1 h 45 min by hand and 16 min with the flow per item, from the table above.
The flow collects, cleans, fills and checks. People keep the definitions, the judgement and the final word.
What “revenue” and “active customer” mean is decided by finance and written into the mapping tables.
Anything the totals check flags is investigated by a person before the report goes out.
Variance explanations drafted by the model are edited by an analyst — nothing reaches leadership unread.
What the numbers mean for the business and what to do about them stays with management.
The flow reports a gap; a person decides whether and how to correct it in the books.
Who can see salaries, margins and cash is set in your Microsoft 365 permissions, not in the flow.
Flip a switch to hand a step to the flow or take it back.
Benchmarks from the DataRails survey of 200 CFOs and the AFP / APQC FP&A study: finance teams spend twice as much time collecting data as analysing it, and the gap between the two is the time an automated report gives back.
We map the process as it runs today, count the minutes and agree what the flow must never do on its own.
A working flow on your real data, in a sandbox. You see every run and every exception.
Edge cases, approvals and alerts, then the switch-over — with the old way kept as a fallback.
Monitoring, fixes when a vendor changes a format, and a monthly report of hours saved.
Yes — that is the point. Your workbook, tabs, formulas and charts stay exactly as they are. The flow writes the data sheets through the Microsoft Graph API or openpyxl and the rest of the workbook recalculates, so the people who read the report notice nothing except that it arrives on time.
Macros and Power Query run inside one workbook on one machine when someone opens it. An automated reporting flow runs on a server on a schedule, talks to QuickBooks, HubSpot or Stripe through their APIs, checks the totals and sends the result. Power Query can still be part of the template.
Anything with an API or an export: QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, HubSpot, Salesforce, Stripe, bank feeds, Google Ads and Meta, plus CSVs that land in a mailbox or a SharePoint folder. PDF statements are read by OCR and a language model.
The run stops before writing anything, and a person gets a message with the difference. Control totals are compared to the source system on every run, so a wrong number is held, not sent.
The model only receives the variance table and writes explanations that cite the rows they came from; it does not calculate numbers. An analyst reads the draft before it goes to leadership.
In your Microsoft 365 tenant or your own server. Access follows your existing SharePoint permissions, the flow runs in your account, and every step is logged. The model can run locally if the data must not leave your network.
A first report is usually running within a few weeks, since the template already exists. After that, changes to sources or definitions are small edits to mapping tables, which your team can make without us.
Describe it in two sentences — we reply within a day with a workflow sketch.
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