The Challenge
Halcyon Accounts is a twelve-person firm serving mid-market owner-managed businesses. Their month-end reporting cycle was a liability. Three team members spent the best part of two weeks each month extracting data from three disconnected systems — a cloud accounting platform, a payroll provider, and an internal job-costing spreadsheet — and stitching it together in Excel before exporting to PDFs.
Every handoff was manual. Reconciliation happened in email threads. There was no audit trail.
What We Built
We designed a lightweight data pipeline that pulls from all three source systems on a scheduled trigger, normalises the data into a single schema, runs reconciliation checks automatically, and generates branded client reports ready for delivery.
The stack was deliberately minimal: no enterprise middleware, no new vendor relationships. Everything ran on infrastructure the firm already paid for.
48 hrsMonth-end close (down from 12 days)Key decisions:
- Schema-first design — reconciliation rules were codified as data contracts, not manual cross-checks
- Exception surfacing — mismatches flag to a review queue rather than failing silently
- No Excel dependency — reports generated directly from validated data
The Outcome
Month-end close went from twelve working days to under 48 hours. Reconciliation accuracy moved from approximately 94% to 100% because the rules are now deterministic. The team reallocated the recovered capacity to business development and onboarded four new clients in the following quarter without hiring.
