A reporting platform that cut budget preparation by around eighty per cent

The problem

The group operated across shipping, commodities, real estate and asset management, with public and private interests inside the same ownership. Each business area kept its own records in its own format. Producing a consolidated view meant a long manual exercise, and by the time it was finished the numbers described a quarter that had already gone.

The budget process had the same shape. Weeks of collecting files, reconciling them by hand, and then having very little time left to think about what the budget actually said.

There was a second problem underneath the first. Expenditure on the private side of the group was recorded, but not in a way that let anyone see what a particular transaction had cost by the time it closed.

What I did

I established a centralised reporting and financial control team and built the platform it worked from. Three things mattered more than the technology:

1. One definition of each number. Consolidation is only useful if everyone agrees what revenue means. Most of the early work was agreeing definitions with the business areas, not writing code.
2. The budget as a living document. Budget and actual sit in the same structure, so variance is a view rather than a separate exercise.
3. Costs attached to the thing that caused them. Private side spend is allocated transaction by transaction as it emerges, so the cost of a deal is known while it is still live.

What changed

The platform became the basis for budgeting and variance tracking in the core industrial business. Producing the budgets took around eighty per cent less time than it had before, and the group could see how it was performing against plan during the year.

The wider point is the one I make to every client now. The value was not the software. It was that a team of people stopped spending their weeks assembling numbers and started spending them reading what the numbers said.

Why this is relevant to your business

Very few businesses have a shipping fleet. Almost all of them have the same underlying problem: information that exists but is spread across places that do not talk to each other, and a monthly or quarterly ritual of assembling it by hand.

That ritual is usually the first thing worth automating.