Case Studies

How Fortivis Cut Their Monthly Financial Reporting Cycle from Days to Near-Zero Touch with Power BI

April 13, 2026By Lets Viz7 min read

Power BICase StudyFinanceDashboard AutomationFinancial Advisory

Fortivis is an Athens-based financial and capital advisory firm. They help their clients understand cash, capital, and performance — which means their own reporting needs to be fast, correct, and trusted by the leadership teams they advise. When they engaged Lets Viz, their monthly financial reporting cycle was taking several days of manual data processing across disconnected systems. They needed Power BI dashboards and the automation behind them.

We partnered with Fortivis for an initial Power BI finance dashboard build and have continued working with them for over a year on additional projects. This case study walks through what we built, how we built it, and what changed in their monthly reporting cycle.

Client snapshot

Company: Fortivis — financial and capital advisory firm based in Athens, Greece
Industry: Professional services / financial advisory
Engagement type: Power BI consulting + backend automation
Initial project length: 2–3 months
Ongoing relationship: 12+ months of additional projects

The challenge: financial reporting that took several days every month

Fortivis's finance data lived in three places: a third-party POS/billing system, a collection of Excel workbooks maintained by different team members, and documents on SharePoint. Every month, the team ran a manual process to pull data out of each source, reconcile the formats, validate the numbers, and stitch together the reports their advisors and clients needed.

That process took several days per cycle. Worse, it was fragile — a small change in one source system required the whole thing to be rerun, and small errors could propagate into the final reports. As the firm grew, the reporting burden grew with it, but the team couldn't absorb more manual work without hiring.

Fortivis needed two things at once:

Power BI dashboards that presented P&L, balance sheet, revenue per client, and budget analysis in a way that drove decision-making — not just pretty charts.
Backend automation that removed the manual data processing from the monthly cycle, with validation built in so the team could trust the numbers without re-checking them.

What we built

We approached this as one project with two deliverables: the dashboards themselves, and the data pipeline that kept them fed. Splitting the two would have shipped pretty dashboards on top of the same manual process — a local optimum.

The dashboards

Four core dashboards covering the reporting needs of a financial advisory firm:

P&L dashboard — revenue and expense breakdown by period, client, and category, with variance vs budget and prior period
Balance sheet dashboard — assets, liabilities, and equity with period-over-period comparison and health ratios
Revenue per client dashboard — client-level revenue mix, concentration risk, and trend analysis for the advisory team
Budget analysis dashboard — budget vs actual with drill-through to line items, variance alerts, and forward forecast view

The backend data pipeline

Underneath the dashboards, we built the ingestion and transformation layer that replaced the manual monthly process:

Source connections to the third-party POS/billing system, Excel workbooks, and SharePoint document libraries
Data cleaning, format normalization, and deduplication across the three sources
Validation checks that flag anomalies (missing periods, unbalanced entries, out-of-range values) before they reach the dashboard
Scheduled refresh so the reports are ready before the team needs them, not built on demand
Error handling and alerting so failures are caught and resolved before the finance team opens the dashboard
A star schema model in Power BI that makes DAX measures fast and new reports cheap to build

The outcome

The monthly reporting cycle no longer runs on several days of manual work. The pipeline handles the ingestion, validation, and refresh on a schedule, and the dashboards are ready when the team needs them. Most months, there's minimal human intervention in the reporting loop at all — the team's time is freed up to focus on analysis and client advisory work rather than data wrangling.

Beyond the time savings, the bigger change is trust. Because the pipeline validates the data before it reaches the dashboards, leadership opens the reports without second-guessing the numbers. That confidence is what made it possible for Fortivis to use Power BI as their real decision-making surface, not just another reporting tool.

In their own words

The backend data automation she implemented has transformed our monthly reporting process. What previously took our team several days of manual data processing now runs seamlessly with minimal intervention. The final deliverables exceeded our expectations in terms of functionality, visual design, and user experience. Our management team can now access critical financial insights instantly, and the solution has significantly enhanced our decision-making capabilities.

— Fortivis leadership team

Why this engagement worked

Three things made this a high-leverage Power BI engagement, and they're the same three things we look for in every finance-dashboard project:

Clear decisions to design around — we knew exactly what the advisory team needed to see each month, so the dashboards could be built around real use cases, not abstract data models.
Ugly-but-real source systems — the data lived in a POS system, Excel, and SharePoint. Working with messy, real-world sources is where most of our value comes from. If the data had been clean and in a warehouse already, the client could have done it themselves.
Automation as part of the build, not an afterthought — shipping dashboards on top of a manual process would have been half a solution. The automation was the half that actually changed the monthly cycle.