REPORTING AUTOMATION
Automating a weekly reporting pack
How a five-hour weekly assembly becomes a refresh — and what has to be true before automating anything.
Illustrative composite scenario. Not a client engagement, not a guaranteed outcome, no client identified.
Abhishek
Abhishek Singh
Akhilesh
Prahalad
Shakti
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How it goes
The sequence.
- 01
Start by not automating
The first move is always to watch the manual process, because what people actually do differs from the documented procedure. In this scenario, two of the seven steps involved judgement — deciding whether an unusual figure was an error or a real event. Automating those would have produced a faster, less reliable process. They stay manual, and the automation is built around them.
- 02
Stabilise the inputs
Four exports arrived weekly in inconsistent shapes. Rather than writing formulas that assume a fixed column order, the import layer matches on header name and reports which expected fields are missing. It fails loudly instead of quietly returning a wrong number — the distinction that matters most in reporting automation.
- 03
Separate data from presentation
The pack's layout was entangled with its calculations, so a formatting change risked breaking a figure. Splitting into a data layer and a presentation layer means the quarterly cosmetic changes stop being risky.
- 04
Automate the assembly, not the judgement
A macro handles the import, validation, refresh and formatting sequence, logging what it did. The two judgement steps prompt the user and wait. The five hours become about twenty minutes plus the thinking that was always the valuable part.
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