While working for a leading financial firm with over 10,000 employees and operations across various global regions, I observed several persistent challenges in their reporting process—commonly referred to as the month end reconciliation reporting. The finance team, though highly skilled, relied heavily on extensive Excel workbooks containing over 80 columns and 40 tabs.

This manual, calculation-heavy approach consumed significant time and limited their ability to deliver timely insights. While the concept of using visualization tools was not new to the team, the sheer volume of data and the complexity of multiple reporting systems had long prevented meaningful progress toward modernization.

To address these challenges, we initiated the migration of reports from Excel/Sharepoint to Tableau. The journey was far from simple. We encountered performance bottlenecks, inconsistencies in carryover balances, calculation discrepancies, database connectivity issues, and frequent data refresh failures. Yet, through this process, we not only delivered a robust and scalable reporting framework but also gained valuable insights into the realities of business intelligence implementation in large-scale financial environments.

In this talk, I will share the key lessons learned from this transformation—covering practical strategies for overcoming reporting bottlenecks, optimizing visualization performance, and managing data complexity in Finance functions. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of reporting challenges in Finance domains and actionable takeaways for driving successful BI and visualization initiatives in large multinational organizations.

Agenda

TUG intro and Speaker intro (5 mins)

"Beyond Excel : Modernizing Month-End Insurance Reporting with Interactive Dashboards" (30 mins)

Q&A (10 mins)