The situation
Every month, a group’s management pack pulls from six places: the finance system, the sales CRM, the operations platform, the HR system, a warehouse database and — inevitably — three spreadsheets. A capable analyst spends four to six days a month assembling it: exporting, pasting, reconciling the numbers that disagree, formatting, chasing commentary, circulating. By the time it lands, the month it describes is half over. When the analyst is on leave, the pack is late. When they leave for good, the knowledge of how the numbers join goes with them.
The old options
A BI dashboard project helps — EBI has built plenty — but dashboards don’t write the pack: the joining, checking, annotating and distributing remains a human’s monthly burden. Hiring more analysts to do assembly work is the expensive way to not solve it.
What we’d deploy
A managed agent whose job is the pack:
- Pulls from every source system on schedule — including the spreadsheets, until their owners are ready to retire them
- Joins and reconciles the figures using the group’s own definitions, and flags what doesn’t reconcile rather than papering over it
- Assembles the pack in the house format: figures, variances against budget and prior year, and draft commentary on the movements for a human to edit
- Routes it for review, collects sign-offs, distributes on the agreed day — every month, without being chased
- Runs under EBI supervision with a full audit trail of every figure’s origin
The deployment
Define the pack, the sources and the definitions with the finance lead. The agent produces last month’s pack first, side by side with the human-built version — the differences become the conversation that hardens the definitions. Live in weeks, with the analyst reviewing rather than assembling.
The economics
A simple subscription from £1,500 a month on annual terms. The analyst gets four to six days a month back for analysis — the job they were actually hired for. The pack lands on the same day every month, on time during holidays, audits and resignations. And the knowledge of how the numbers join is encoded, owned and documented rather than resident in one tired person.
Month three
The board gets the pack earlier, with reconciliation flags instead of silent fudges. The analyst presents insight instead of explaining formatting. And the monthly service report — figures delivered, sources reconciled, exceptions flagged, days returned — quietly makes the case for the next agent.