Possible Pain Points

Here are some possible pain points you or your teams may have, and it is most certainly not an exhaustible list:

Finance-Related Pain Points

Where the cracks in core processes cost time, accuracy, or trust in the numbers.

  • Manual journals and recurring journals done by memory
  • No clear checklist or ownership across the close
  • Lack of version control on key files
  • Rolling forward month-end files manually
  • Reporting packs that take hours to build every time
  • Multiple companies with different charts of accounts
  • Too many steps and approvals for simple requests
  • No visibility of where things are stuck
  • Tasks tracked across sticky notes, inboxes, and spreadsheets
  • Manual workarounds for finance system gaps
  • Disorganised file and folder structures
  • Excel files linked to other Excel files linked to ‘Dave’s desktop
  • Lack of naming conventions — can’t find anything
  • Reports that don’t match between systems
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  • System reports don’t produce what’s actually needed
  • Metrics and KPIs pulled together manually every time
  • No consistency in how numbers are calculated or shared
  • Inherited processes no one questions
  • Workarounds passed down through teams without documentation
  • ‘Claire’ built everything, and since she left, nobody knows how it works
  • We press a button and it pops up with something to do with de-bugging. We just click past it, and it seems to be ok.
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Other Department Pain Points

Where inefficiencies outside finance still clog up operations and kill momentum.

  • Multiple spreadsheets used to calculate and track bonuses
  • Difficult to reconcile. The lookups are on employee names so break when one has ‘Dave Taylor Smith’ and the other one has ‘David Taylor-Smith’.
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  • New starter/customer onboarding trackers managed in siloed spreadsheets
  • Training records scattered or missing
  • Status updates held in people’s heads or emails
  • See Finance. And yes — it’s still broken.
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  • See Finance