Ending the Monthly Scramble to Fill In a Scorecard by Hand

The challenge

The leadership team ran on a scorecard in a management platform, and every cycle somebody rebuilt those numbers by hand out of the accounting system. The figures were only as current as the last person to update them, and nobody could easily say which underlying account a given KPI actually came from.

Where we came in

Before automating a number you have to agree what it means, and that is usually the part that gets skipped. We built a verification workbook and an auto-matcher first, so the client could confirm each KPI's source — and we booked a meeting specifically to resolve the ones that could not be matched, rather than guessing at a definition and automating the guess.

What we did

• Reverse-engineered the management platform's authentication and API for both reading and writing
• Created read-only directory app registrations and read-only accounting access across all companies
• Built a local warehouse of general-ledger data and a reader for the existing scorecard
• Built a verification workbook and an automatic matcher pairing scorecard values against accounting sources
• Held a working session with the client to define the KPIs the matcher could not resolve, rather than assuming them
• Built the sync engine only once the sources were agreed, then moved it to production

Where it landed

• Scorecard values are populated from the accounting system rather than re-keyed each cycle
• Every automated KPI has an agreed, documented source rather than an inherited definition
• Access to the source systems is read-only by design