Work Atlas Capital
Compliance reporting from two weeks to one afternoon
Quarterly reports took three people a fortnight of manual assembly. Reconciliation now happens on ingest, and the report is a query rather than a project.
- Industry
- Fintech
- Year
- 2024
- Stack
- Data pipeline · D1 · Audit trail
2 wks → 4 hrs
quarterly close
The problem
Quarterly reporting took three people two weeks of manual assembly, and every figure had its provenance re-explained each time. The expensive part was never the arithmetic; it was the back-and-forth about why a number was what it was.
The constraint
This is regulated data. Every figure has to be traceable to source records, and the process itself has to leave a trail. "We recalculated and this time it is right" is not an acceptable sentence here.
The approach
Reconciliation moved from quarter end to ingest time. Each record is compared, flagged and recorded as it arrives. The report stopped being a project and became a query.
One decision
We do not correct historical data. Records that do not reconcile are kept as they are and flagged, rather than edited into agreement. An audit needs to see what actually happened; a database tidied up after the fact is clean and worthless.
The trade-off
So the report carries a "flagged, unresolved" column, and in the first quarter it was not zero. The client disliked that number at first. Three months later it was the column they looked at most.
The outcome
Two weeks to four hours, and any number on the page opens up to show where it came from and which steps it passed through.
Since then
Preparation for the 2025 routine examination took two days instead of two weeks. Their compliance lead said the useful part was not the speed — it was no longer having to answer "how do you know".