Optimizing Finance Reports with SharePoint

Case Study

A company reached out to us with a request to help their finance department that was drowning in Excel files and missed deadlines. They encountered a lot of problems and inconveniences in their working process:

1. Excel file for finance statements was created and sent to all the departments manually;
2. The departments would inadvertently fill in someone else’s line or column and cause a distortion in the whole merging process;
3. Deadlines were often missed due to the lack of reminders that had to be sent manually;
4. All the reports from the departments have to be merged manually;

Their established process was quite a chore: finance manager was constantly in a huge stress over multiple tables that wouldn’t merge and had to be fixed manually as well as endless reminders they had to send to all departments. Their process looked like this:

As a solution, we created a SharePoint system that automated the whole process, making it much easier for everyone involved. Here is what changed:

1. Requests for filling in the tables are sent automatically when the time for report submission comes;
2. Each department has access to their relevant fields only to eliminate human errors and line\column confusion;
3. To avoid submissions that are overdue, the system sends reminders to the departments that have not yet filled in their reports;
4. The final document is created by the system itself, based on all reports submitted by different departments. When the final report is ready, it is send to the finance department.

No more manual generation of documents — now it takes no human involvement at all. With automatic reminders and auto-merging no deadlines have been missed ever since. Since these stages (generation, reminders and merging) now take no time, what report work used to be done in an hour, now takes roughly 10 minutes. The automated process looks like this:

The following business results were achieved:

• 86% less time spent on report assembly;
• $0 fines payed ever since;
• 0 hours spent on report generation
• Much less stress for the finance department.

Results

This project was the quickest in our experience with SharePoint but it made a complicated process of assembling finance reports in time much more convenient than it used to be. It can serve as an example that SharePoint projects are not necessarily massive and time-consuming: they can be as short as a little over a week of development and yet yield amazing results.