The hidden line item
Manual reporting cost does not appear in a budget. It is absorbed into analyst salaries, service manager evenings and the two days before every board meeting.
Because it is invisible, it is never compared against the cost of fixing it.
An illustrative monthly cycle
Reports produced
23
Preparation hours
146
per month
Rework and reconciliation
38%
of that time
Analyst days lost
19
per month
Where the preparation time goes
- Extraction and manual joins34%
- Reconciliation and checking27%
- Formatting and distribution22%
- Commentary and analysis17%
Illustrative distribution from reporting reviews
The insight
In most reporting cycles the majority of effort is spent preparing data rather than interpreting it. Automation is not primarily a cost-saving exercise — it moves analyst capacity from assembling numbers to explaining them.
What to automate first
The strongest candidates are reports that are produced frequently, follow a fixed structure and require no judgement during preparation.
Low-frequency reports that demand interpretation are usually poor automation candidates and better addressed by improving the underlying data.
Questions worth asking
- How many hours per month go into producing recurring reports?
- Which reports are produced but not used in any decision?
- How often are figures reconciled between two sources by hand?
- What proportion of analyst time is spent on analysis rather than preparation?
- Which report, if automated, would release the most senior time?
Any figures shown are illustrative and used to demonstrate an analytical approach. They do not describe a real Coreridge Solutions client.