Replacing a full-time reporting role for 250 branches
outcome a £30,000+ a year manual process, automated and expanded
Problem
The company’s largest client was renegotiating its contract, and one stipulation was concrete: they were letting go of the person who built their daily operations reports by hand, and the work had to be replaced. Every morning this person extracted data from the platform and produced KPI and feedback reports for the managers of roughly 250 branches. The reports needed two Excel extracts (online reviews and survey answers) alongside KPI visuals, which ruled out the platform’s standard PDF-only subscription tooling entirely.
What I built
A paginated-report dispatch engine. Paginated reports can carry real Excel extracts, so each email lands with KPI visuals inline, highlighting improvements and declines, plus both extracts attached.
The harder problem was who gets what. The client runs a management hierarchy: three operations directors, seven regional operations managers, each with ten to fifteen operations managers, each responsible for five to ten branches, plus the brand level. Every layer needs a slightly different report scoped to its slice of the estate. Recipients and scopes are derived from the client’s own category structure, surfaced into a shared sheet that the client and we manage together, so the distribution list is never a support ticket.
Techniques that made it work
- Choosing the right vehicle: paginated reports because the requirement (Excel extracts) disqualified the default tooling, not because they were fashionable
- Hierarchy as data: report scoping and recipients derived from the client’s category setup, not hand-maintained lists
- Shared ownership: the client edits the same sheet the engine reads, so changes need no engineering
Outcome
The work of a role costing more than £30,000 a year now runs automatically, and where the person worked Monday to Friday, the reports go out seven days a week. Delivered as one of the stipulated initiatives behind the renewal of the client worth over half of revenue, alongside the composite metric in case study A.