Your Reporting Problem Isn't a Tools Problem
Most firms I've worked with think their reporting is broken because they're using the wrong software.
“If only we had [insert shiny new BI tool], this would be so easy.”
That’s completely wrong. In reality, they're using the wrong process.
Here's one example. At a national life insurer, I inherited a reporting infrastructure built on 40+ recurring Excel workbooks. People had been maintaining them by hand for years; pulling data from source systems, copy-pasting into templates, formatting for leadership, emailing out. Every month. For every report.
“What if someone was out of office?”, you might ask, or “What if an overnight process didn’t run in time?”. The answer is always the same: delays, delays, delays.
The natural instinct was to buy a BI tool and call it fixed. But the real problem wasn't Excel. It was that no one had ever sat down and asked: what decisions are these reports actually supporting? Which of these 40 reports does anyone look at? And what would it take to make the data flow automatically so no one touches a spreadsheet?
When we finally asked those questions, we found that about half the reports weren't being used. The ones that mattered got rebuilt with automated SQL pipelines feeding directly into dashboards. The manual effort dropped by 90%.
It wasn’t the tool that was the fix, but rather an effort in ownership: someone with enough context to challenge the assumptions baked into the process and enough technical skill to rebuild it properly.
I see the same pattern everywhere. A firm has seven people touching the same data in different spreadsheets. Leadership gets a monthly report that's already stale by the time it arrives, and different leaders may get different recommendations. Somebody suggests Tableau or Power BI, maybe a Snowflake migration, or hey, what about those AI agents? And those might be the right tools eventually. But installing software on top of a broken process just gives you a more expensive broken process.
If your reporting takes too long, start with three questions before you buy anything:
Which reports actually inform a decision and which exist because they always have?
Where is someone manually moving data between systems that could be automated with a script?
Who owns the end-to-end accuracy of the numbers leadership sees?
If you can't answer the third one clearly, that's your actual problem.
