Consolidating 7 reporting systems into one source of truth

The CFO had inherited a reporting landscape that had grown organically over fifteen years. Clinical data lived in Epic. Financial data was split between QuickBooks Enterprise and a series of Excel workbooks maintained by the controller. HR and payroll ran through Workday. Three departments had built their own Access databases for operational tracking.

Monthly close was a three-week ordeal. The first week was spent gathering data from each system. The second week was reconciliation — trying to figure out why the numbers didn't match. The third week was manually building the board report. By the time leadership saw the numbers, they were already six weeks old.

The deeper problem was trust. When the CEO asked a simple question — "what was our margin last quarter?" — three people would give three different answers, each defensible from their own data source. Decision-making had effectively stalled because nobody could agree on the baseline.

We started with a two-week diagnostic, mapping every data flow and manual handoff across all seven systems. The mapping alone was revelatory — the finance team had no idea that clinical scheduling data was being manually re-keyed into an Access database every Friday afternoon.

We built the unified data layer on Microsoft Fabric, creating automated pipelines from each source system into a single semantic model. The key design decision was establishing one authoritative definition for every shared metric — revenue, patient volume, labor cost, margin — and documenting the calculation logic so that any discrepancy could be traced to its source.

The first unified report was delivered in four weeks. It wasn't perfect — there were data quality issues in the Access databases that required cleanup — but for the first time, the CFO could see all seven systems reconciled in a single view.

Full deployment took ten weeks. Monthly close dropped from three weeks to four days. The board report that used to consume the controller's entire third week now generates automatically with a single refresh.

The labor savings were significant — approximately $340K annually in time previously spent on manual data gathering, reconciliation, and report building. But the more important outcome was speed and trust. Leadership now has access to weekly financial and operational dashboards that update automatically. Questions that used to trigger a two-week data gathering exercise now get answered in minutes.

The three departmental Access databases were decommissioned within six months as users migrated to the centralized dashboards. The Excel workbooks are still maintained as a backup, but the controller reports that she hasn't opened them in four months.