How Edrak reduced a professional services firm’s management reporting cycle by 60%

The company

The firm employs more than 400 people across Saudi Arabia and the UAE, advising clients through several specialist practices.

Its leadership team relies on a monthly management report to understand revenue, project profitability, utilization, collections and performance against budget.

Producing that report required information from the firm’s finance system, CRM, time-tracking platform, project records and individual business units.

Reporting depended on people chasing people

At the end of every month, Finance began the same process.

Analysts exported data from multiple systems, reformatted spreadsheets and asked practice leaders to explain unusual movements. Responses arrived through email, messages and comments inside different files.

The Finance team then had to determine:

• Whether revenue movements reflected timing or underlying performance
• Why project margins had changed
• Which overdue invoices were commercially at risk
• Whether utilization changes were temporary or structural
• Why actual performance differed from the budget
• Which explanations should appear in the management report

The work crossed several systems and depended on people who were also responsible for serving clients.

Finance spent days gathering information before it could begin analysing it. Practice leaders received repeated questions because earlier responses were difficult to find or lacked the necessary detail.

By the time the report reached management, some of its commentary already described events that were nearly two weeks old.

Starting with the monthly management report

The firm deployed Atlas around one clearly defined process: preparing the monthly management report for leadership review.

Foundry connected the systems and documents already used by the firm, including:

• Financial statements and general-ledger exports
• Project revenue and cost records
• Time and utilization data
• CRM pipeline information
• Accounts-receivable reports
• Approved budgets and forecasts
• Previous management reports
• Commentary submitted by practice leaders

The firm then defined its reporting structure, materiality thresholds and approval requirements.

Atlas learned how the firm already produced its report and took responsibility for the repetitive work around that process.

From fragmented data to a review-ready report

At month-end, Atlas brought the required information into a controlled reporting workflow.

It checked whether each expected data set had been received, identified missing periods and flagged inconsistencies before analysis began.

Atlas then compared actual performance with the previous month, budget and forecast. It surfaced material movements based on thresholds established by the Finance team.

For every significant variance, Atlas assembled the relevant context:

• The accounts and projects contributing to the movement
• Changes in headcount or utilization
• New or delayed client engagements
• Billing and collection activity
• Explanations provided in earlier reporting periods
• Related commentary from practice leaders

Where an explanation was still required, Atlas sent a focused request to the responsible person. Instead of receiving a general message asking them to “explain the variance,” the practice leader received the specific movement, underlying records and questions requiring an answer.

The response returned directly to the reporting workflow.

Atlas used the approved information to prepare a first draft of the report, including performance tables, variance explanations and management commentary. Every statement remained linked to the data and source material supporting it.

Finance began its work with a complete draft instead of an empty reporting template.

Finance remained accountable for the numbers

Management reporting requires judgment. A change in revenue may be mathematically straightforward but commercially complex. A delayed project can affect revenue recognition, utilization, collections and the forecast in different ways.

The firm did not want AI publishing conclusions without review.

Atlas was therefore configured around explicit controls. Finance remained responsible for:

• Confirming the underlying financial figures
• Approving variance explanations
• Determining whether commentary was sufficiently supported
• Adjusting forecasts and management conclusions
• Approving the final report before distribution

Atlas handled data collection, reconciliation, retrieval, first-pass analysis and drafting. Material exceptions were escalated to the appropriate employee.

The system retained a record of every source, change and approval. Reviewers could move from a sentence in the report to the supporting calculation, business explanation and original record.

This allowed the firm to accelerate reporting without weakening financial control.

Reducing the cycle from nine days to fewer than four

The firm initially deployed the workflow across two business units. Finance compared Atlas’s output with its existing reporting process for two monthly cycles before expanding it across the organization.

Following the wider rollout, the firm reported:

• A 60% reduction in reporting time, bringing the monthly cycle from nine working days to fewer than four
• 110 hours of manual work removed each month across data preparation, follow-up and first-draft production
• 75% fewer follow-up messages between Finance and business-unit leaders
• Material variances identified on the first day of the reporting cycle rather than after the report had been assembled
• More consistent commentary across practices and reporting periods
• 100% Finance approval retained for reported figures and management conclusions

The improvement came from removing the administrative work surrounding the analysis, not from asking analysts to work faster.

A different role for the Finance team

Before Atlas, much of the reporting cycle was spent exporting, reformatting, searching and following up.

After deployment, analysts spent more time investigating performance, challenging explanations and helping leadership understand what required action.

Practice leaders also spent less time responding to broad or repeated requests. When their input was needed, they received a precise question with the relevant context already attached.

The monthly leadership meeting changed as well. Because the report arrived earlier, executives had more time to review it before the meeting. Discussions shifted away from confirming what had happened and toward deciding what to do next.

Building institutional understanding over time

Each reporting cycle previously began with many of the same questions.

Why had a practice missed its utilization target? Was a margin movement expected? Had a delayed payment already been discussed? Was the revenue variance caused by delivery, billing or recognition timing?

Foundry retained the firm’s approved explanations and linked them to the relevant figures, projects and reporting periods.

This gave Finance access to the history behind a number, not just the number itself.

When a similar variance appeared in a later month, Atlas could retrieve the earlier explanation, determine whether the underlying condition remained relevant and present that context to the analyst.

The firm’s reporting knowledge no longer disappeared into old spreadsheets and email threads. It became part of the next reporting cycle.

Extending the operating model

After deploying management reporting, the firm began applying Atlas to adjacent finance and operational workflows:

• Weekly project-margin monitoring
• Accounts-receivable and collection reviews
• Utilization and capacity reporting
• Forecast preparation
• Client-engagement risk reviews
• Board-report preparation
• Budget-owner follow-ups

Each workflow follows the same model: Atlas assembles the information, completes the repetitive analysis and prepares the work for review. Employees remain responsible for the financial judgments and decisions that follow.

The outcome

The firm needed the work required to produce a trusted management view to happen faster and with less manual coordination.

Atlas and Foundry reduced the reporting cycle by 60%, gave Finance more time for analysis and preserved employee control over every reported figure.

The report still belonged to Finance. Producing it no longer consumed most of the month-end.