I’ve worked with several organizations in recent years, and surprisingly, it’s often the ones that seemed the most “organized” where I found the same recurring pattern—a reporting process that looks fine on the surface but consumes enormous amounts of time and is full of vulnerabilities.
Here are some signs that might sound familiar:
1. There’s more than one Excel file containing the same data
2. Someone (or several people) is responsible each month for “copying everything into Word”
3. Any small change in a single number → triggers rounds of updates throughout the entire report
4. There’s a “validation” step where people manually scan for cross-checking errors
5. In the end, versions are saved with names like “final_final_v2_for real.pdf”
Sound familiar?
If you recognize two or more of these, there’s probably room for automation.
And we’re not talking about a new cloud system or an ERP overhaul—but simple solutions within Excel and Word that can do the job more accurately and much faster.
