Finance controller

Month end finance consolidation of exports from many tools

Collect each tool export in a cloud folder, convert every file with a template that normalizes column names, dates and amounts, merge them into one table with a source column, remove duplicates and deliver a consolidated XLSX or CSV ready for review and import.

At month end the finance team gathers exports from the billing system, the payroll provider, the expense tool, card statements and two bank accounts. Each export has its own date format, sign convention, currency formatting and column names, and some arrive as XLS, some as CSV with semicolons.

Consolidating them by hand means hours of copy and paste in the busiest week of the month. Small inconsistencies, such as a date read as month first or a negative amount shown in parentheses, produce reconciliation differences that take even longer to trace.

The workflow

1. 1Collect exportsEach tool export is saved to a shared Google Drive, Dropbox or S3 folder, which the pipeline watches as its source.
2. 2Normalize each sourceA template per tool maps its columns to a common layout, converts dates to ISO format, turns parentheses and trailing minus signs into negative numbers and removes thousands separators.
3. 3MergeAll normalized files are merged into one sheet, with a source column that records which tool each row came from.
4. 4DeduplicateRows that appear in two exports, such as a card payment present in both the expense tool and the bank file, are flagged or removed by a key you choose.
5. 5Deliver for reviewThe consolidated XLSX goes back to the finance folder and a CSV goes to the import location of the accounting system.

An example calculation

Example calculation, not a customer result. If two team members each spend 6 hours on consolidation every month end, that is 12 hours per month. At a loaded cost of 60 USD per hour, the work costs 720 USD per month, or 8,640 USD per year, compared with 888 USD per year for the Business plan billed yearly.