How to Stop Building Excel Reports by Hand: Four Steps

Preparing reports by hand rarely looks like a problem — until you add up the time. Two days a month is twenty-four days a year spent copying data from one system into another.

Moving to automated reports doesn’t mean doing everything at once. Four steps are enough.

1. List the reports you actually prepare

In almost every company, this list comes as a surprise. It often turns out that:

• some reports are prepared out of habit and nobody reads them;
• several reports duplicate one another, just in a different format;
• the most important reports are prepared least often, because they take the longest.

Before automating anything, it is worth dropping what you don’t need. An unnecessary report that has been automated is still unnecessary.

2. Agree on how metrics are defined

This is the dullest step, but the most valuable. What counts as a sale — an invoice issued or an invoice paid? Is margin calculated after discounts? Do returns reduce sales in the month they happen, or in the month of the original purchase?

Until these questions are answered, every version of the report will be “nearly right”. Once they are, automation becomes simple.

3. Connect the data to its source

The key difference between Excel and an automated report is that the connection to the data stays in place. The report isn’t a file of copied figures — it pulls the latest data from the accounting system by itself.

If you use Rivilė or Finvalda, this step is straightforward: ready-built packages connect directly to the database.

4. Move recurring reports, keep one-off ones

Don’t try to move everything. It is worth automating what repeats: monthly financial summaries, sales reports, lists of outstanding debts, stock levels.

Excel stays where it is strong — modelling, budgeting and one-off calculations. We wrote about this in more detail in the article Excel or Power BI.

What to expect after the switch

The first noticeable change is that the month-end rush disappears. The second, often unexpected: more people start reading the reports, because they are available at any time, not just when someone has prepared them.

The third is that conversations change. Instead of arguing over whose figures are right, people talk about what to do with them.

What it costs you now

Before you start, it is worth working out the current cost — it is the only figure that turns “we ought to some day” into a decision.

The calculation is simple: hours per month × hourly cost × 12. If a finance officer spends two days a month on reports, that is almost a month of work a year — and that is only the direct part.

The indirect part is usually bigger: decisions taken late because the data arrived three weeks after the fact, and errors introduced during copying. Neither shows up in any report.

What not to do

Three mistakes that drag out the switch or derail it altogether:

• Moving everything at once. Thirty reports in the first month means none of them gets used. Start with five.
• Automating a process that hasn’t been sorted out. If a report is wrong when done by hand, the automated version will be wrong faster and more often.
• Running the old and the new side by side. As long as the Excel version exists, some people will keep looking at it, and the argument over the figures won’t go away. Once a report has been moved, the old one needs to be retired.

What to do with the time freed up

One question comes up in almost every project, especially from accountants: does this mean there will be less work?

In practice, the amount of work doesn’t change — its nature does. Time previously spent copying data shifts to making sure the data is correct and explaining it: why a metric has changed, what it means, and what to recommend to management.

This is the part no system can do — and it is usually more valuable than preparing summaries.

Where to start

The simplest approach is to start with the one report you prepare most often. The ready-built packages for Rivilė and Finvalda users already cover most standard reports — you can see what they look like in the examples.