Somewhere in your organization a person spends the last week of every month or quarter assembling a report by hand from four systems. That person is usually the one you most need thinking about something else.
What we do
Pick one report. A state submittal, a council packet, a grant draw request, a monthly operating report, an annual water loss audit. We trace every figure in it to the record it comes from, build the assembly once, and hand you something that produces the report on a schedule.
The tracing is most of the work and it is the part with the durable value. It is common for this exercise to establish that two figures in the same report have been derived from the same underlying number by two different methods for years, and that nobody knew because nobody had cause to look.
What you get
The report, produced. The assembly, documented, with each figure tied to its source system and field. A list of the places where the source data cannot actually support the figure the form asks for — which is a compliance finding worth having in writing before an auditor produces it for you.
Why this one is often first
It needs no capital budget, it does not touch a system of record, and it frees a specific named person’s specific named week. That makes it the easiest thing in this list to approve and the fastest to demonstrate. It also puts us inside the data long enough to see what else is wrong, which is usually how the next conversation starts.