Annual Financial Reporting Automation, amplifying efficiency, accuracy & profits

Client Overview

As one of India's leading diversified financial services conglomerate, the Client provides a broad range of financial products and services globally, catering to a substantial and differentiated client base, including corporations, institutions and individuals.

Project Summary

The client needed an innovative, efficient & accurate solution to generate Annual Financial Reports on time with greater control over user’s input. 

Earlier, nearly 40 departments were taking more than 4 months to generate required reports from multiple excel files for multiple business entities from 500+ pages, 150+ excel tables and lots of text content.

The Data was distributed to multiple business entities to fill and submit the note disclosures. Respective members from each team were doing data evaluation and later confirming the data submission.

Upon submission, the reporting team manually generating report in a word document from submitted excel sheets’ data. Adding to the complexity, multiple persons worked on different report sections and finally consolidating to a single report.

The manual report generation was time & effort consuming because of inaccurate data, inadequate control and complexities of integrations.

Challenges

Client’s top management had several brainstorming discussions with Ray Business Technologies’ (RBT) BFSI SMEs over current processes, workflow and complexities to generate Annual Financial Report.
Challenges were identified as:

• Major difficulty in preparing Annual Financial report, accurately and on time; was due to fewer control over distributed business entities participation, collaboration on data & input and manual consolidation of notes & data validation
• The AFR included more than 150 tables and above 500 pages
• Data entry from different teams was not in standard template.
• The data was collected from 600 plus excel sheets.
• There were inter connection between excel sheets for data validation.
• More than 100 employees from different business entities were updating the data.
• Data validation is very time consuming
• Lots of man hours wasted to generate final Annual financial report

 Goals

• Simplify and standardize Data Entry templates
• Build a Data management application to distribute, Consolidate all financial disclosure notes. So, everything can be managed from a single window.
• Provide a centralized managed location to pick up the required templates from a master list for business entities.
• Track the version history and updates of Excel to avoid multiple copies of excel file distributions
• Automate the report building using the financial disclosure notes as source
• Automate the data validation by providing a dashboard to review the validation result
• Export the generated report into word or pdf in a printable format

Solution:

RBT continued to work with client’s stakeholders to understand their views on current processes & proposed solution to address their specific needs to achieve project objectives.

• Used SharePoint, Power Apps, Power automates and Power Bi paginated report to automate the report building
• Prepared standard template for all 150+ business notes, stored in SharePoint list and protected using SharePoint Role based access.
• Excel template are locked with passwords allowing access to data entry fields only. All formulas and template columns protected from unauthorized changes.
• A Power App dashboard is developed with Canvas’ User interface, enabling users to select appropriate templates, and add selected template to their entity/department to update the notes.
• The access allocation is automated using power automate from backend.
• RBT used Power Automate to copy the selected notes from master library to appropriate entity folder based on selected template and confirmation from user.
• Created SharePoint list aligned to the note templates to store data entry from users.
• We have created multiple power flows to extract and insert data from excel files to appropriate SharePoint Lists
• Created an automated data validation logic using power flows and data events + schedulers and inserted the validation result to a SharePoint list and A power bi report will use this table as data source and generated a validation result dashboard.
• Multiple sub reports are build using Power bi paginated reports and consolidated all reports into a single report.
• Page layout for each report canvas, content sections and tables are arranged to make sure we can export and print report properly

Benefits/Business Case

The business solution, significantly reduced complex manual efforts and helped the client to generate Annual Financial Reports with 99.9% accuracy and on time. This became possible with RBT’s extensive BFSI vertical experience & innovative approach, using Office 365, Power Apps, Power automates and Power BI.

All stakeholders’ efforts were aligned to the standard process. Every flow within the process is controlled from SharePoint. Report generation became a few clicks job, once all data is ready.

Data collection is monitored and guided using SharePoint and PowerApps. Data transformation is automated using Power Automate and BI.

The new system amplifying efficiency, accuracy & profits for the client.

About Ray Business Technologies Private Limited:

Ray Business Technologies Private Limited is a Global Information Technology (IT) Services and Solutions company. We are a CMMI Level 3 company, providing Business & IT Solutions to Enterprises worldwide, enabling them to utilize available resources effectively and manage the operations. Our excellent team of SMEs & Technology Professionals work with enterprise clients in North America, Latin America, Australia, Europe, Middle East and Asia.