From spreadsheets to strategy: how GlobalData automated finance reporting without breaking the culture

4,000 employees, zero internal dashboards

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GlobalData is one of the world’s foremost data analytics and consulting businesses, delivering intelligence to clients across healthcare, technology, financial services, and consumer markets. Its external reporting capabilities are world-class – but like many fast-growing organizations, internal analytics had not received the same level of investment.

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When Chris Smith joined as Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, he saw an opportunity to transform how 4,000 employees consumed and acted on internal data. There were no dashboards, no self-service tools, no centralized reporting layer. Teams relied heavily on Excel, producing spreadsheets that, by the time they reached decision-makers, were often already out of date.

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“Everything was Excel-based. We’ve got 4,000 employees, and we are so heavy on Excel. It’s unbelievable. We’re really good at reporting externally to all our customers, but internally, it’s kind of been forgotten about.” — Chris Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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Chris’s remit was clear: automate the reporting, enable self-service, and shift the team’s focus from data production to strategic analysis.

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Chris has presented key insights at a recent BI Breakfast event. See the highlights here:‍

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A decade of workarounds built on Excel

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As GlobalData had scaled, internal reporting processes had accumulated organically. Over the years, teams had developed workarounds to bridge gaps between source systems and the reports leadership needed — pulling data into Excel, enriching it manually, and passing the resulting spreadsheets along. What began as pragmatic solutions had, over time, become entrenched workflows.

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“Somebody years ago wanted a sales report out of Salesforce, and the data wasn’t quite right, so he got everything into Excel and manipulated it. The week after, somebody asked for a sales report, and he used his Excel file again. This carried on for years. What he’d effectively done was build a database in Excel without fixing Salesforce.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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The consequences were familiar to any large enterprise. Monthly management accounts — a critical finance deliverable — required a team of approximately 250 accountants to spend days each month on a manual cycle: exporting data as CSV files, opening pre-formatted Excel templates, copying data into a data tab, refreshing pivot tables, and running calculation tabs to produce the final output. ARR calculations, given the complexity of GlobalData’s customer and product base, were difficult to compile at the scale and speed leadership needed.

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With Snowflake in place as the data warehouse, the final piece was a reporting layer that could query live data, automate outputs, and encourage adoption across a workforce deeply accustomed to Excel.

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Why Astrato: the Excel export that changed everything

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GlobalData evaluated several BI platforms, including leading tools recommended by external consultants. Chris, having worked with enterprise BI tools for fifteen years, saw this as a rare greenfield opportunity to take a different approach. The decision came down to one capability and one relationship.

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The capability was deceptively simple: Astrato’s ability to export directly into pre-formatted Excel and PowerPoint templates. In other tools Christopher had used, the workflow was painfully familiar — export to CSV, open a template, copy-paste data into a data tab, refresh pivot tables, run calculation tabs. Each step introduced errors and wasted time. Astrato collapsed that entire chain into a single click.

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“With other BI tools, you have to download as a CSV, which doesn’t solve any issues at all. You’re just adding another layer of complexity. What drew me to Astrato was the ability to click a button and it exports in a way you want it to export and it looks the way that the business knows it should look. — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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The relationship was equally decisive. Christopher found a team willing to work alongside him — responsive, collaborative, and invested in GlobalData’s success in a way that larger vendors could not match.

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“Everyone I spoke to was just really nice. And that goes a long way when you’re trying to build something. If there’s an issue, it gets fixed straight away. You’re at the other end of the line, which with larger vendors, that’s never going to be the case.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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The bridge from Excel: familiar outputs, new habits

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Christopher had seen BI migrations stumble before – not because of the technology, but because of the approach. At a previous employer, his team migrated from Excel to a leading BI platform. The result was instructive: users exported dashboards to CSV and went straight back to their pivot tables. A new tool, the same behaviour, and an extra layer of complexity.

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“It’s typically all or nothing. No more Excel, you’re going into the BI tool now. That doesn’t really solve a problem. It potentially creates more problems than it solves.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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At GlobalData, Christopher took a different approach. He used Astrato as a bridge.

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The finance team still receives their Excel output and PowerPoint packs – the formats they are accustomed to, the ones their auditors expect. But to access them, they go through Astrato first. And once inside, human curiosity takes over. They start clicking around. They spot an insight in the P&L drill-down. They pull up a renewals list. They begin to explore.

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“You’ve got to be quite sneaky with it. You take away a little piece at a time so they don’t notice. We’ll replace this Excel pivot table with a click of a button. Then, how do we replace this Excel file with what’s in Astrato? You do it bit by bit, and people don’t really notice. They just naturally come on the journey with you.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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The strategy is deliberately gradualist. Nobody was mandated. Nobody was forced. The culture shifted organically – because the familiar outputs remained available while the underlying process changed.

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“People are comfortable with how they do things. You can’t suddenly say you’re not doing it this way anymore. They still get to ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ – but the journey is just a little bit different with Astrato.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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Two teams, two paths to adoption

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Adoption at GlobalData followed two distinct patterns – and both validated the bridge approach.

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The sales operations team adopted Astrato almost immediately. Their need was urgent: they were struggling to function without real-time reporting, and as soon as the first reports were live, dozens of users were on the platform daily. For them, adoption was driven by necessity.

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The finance team’s path was more gradual. They already had a working process – slow and manual, but it produced the management accounts every month. The cultural resistance was greater. Christopher’s bridge strategy was designed precisely for this group: maintain the familiar Excel output, let them experience the Astrato interface alongside it, and wait for curiosity to do the work.

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“Now there are probably 40 people in there all the time. The momentum is building. People are actually starting to see the benefit and the need for it. We’ve gone from phase one to phase two, and we’re working on phase three for the management accounts.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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ARR in real time: the eureka moment

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The ARR dashboard was one of the first deliverables – and it proved to be the turning point for leadership buy-in.

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GlobalData’s CFO had been receiving ARR data via monthly Excel files. By the time a report was produced, the data was already stale. The new Astrato dashboard gave him something he had never had: live, granular ARR data available on demand. A currency toggle switched between reported currency and constant currency, stripping out foreign exchange effects to reveal true commercial performance. A detailed bridge analysis showed new business, churn, downsell, and upsell at a level of detail that was previously impossible to compile.

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“I think the ARR was a bit of a eureka moment. The CFO could just go into a report and the numbers are live and there. He didn’t need to chase anybody. He didn’t need to ask follow-up questions. And then he started showing other people around the business in different departments. That’s where you start to build momentum.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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The ARR dashboard also drove behavioural change downstream. For the first time, churn reasons were visible in reporting. When the team noticed that many records lacked a specific lost reason, it triggered an immediate process improvement: sales teams now record structured reasons when a customer churns. That data, in turn, feeds an AI model built on Snowflake Cortex that analyses churn patterns across the business.

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The CFO’s reaction paved the way for the larger management accounts project. Once leadership had seen what live data could do, the ambition expanded.

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“With everything in life, you need the key to open the door to your imagination. The ARR report did that. Then it was, well, why don’t we just do management accounts in Astrato? And then we took that another step further with the Excel export templates.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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Management accounts: from 4–5 person-weeks to one click

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The management accounts transformation is where the efficiency gains are most dramatic.

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GlobalData’s finance function includes approximately 250 accountants. Each month, they were spending days on a manual process: exporting CSVs, opening pre-formatted templates, copying data into data tabs, refreshing pivot tables, and running calculation tabs. It was painstaking, repetitive work — and five times out of ten, something would break along the way, forcing them to start over.

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“I don’t think any accountant trains to be copying and pasting in Excel. The task was, how can we get rid of all these Excel spreadsheets and move management accounts without upsetting everybody, and keeping the output the same.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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Astrato automates the entire workflow. An interactive P&L provides drill-down to journal-level detail, enabling accountants to spot and fix errors in real time throughout the month rather than discovering them at month-end. When they are satisfied, a single click exports the management accounts to Excel and PowerPoint in the exact format the business expects. Row-level security ensures the CFO can view multiple budgets while other users see only their own.

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The export replaces what previously consumed four to five people working for a full week, every month. Christopher estimates the savings at hundreds of hours.

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“This used to take four or five people a week’s worth of work every month to do. Now it’s done at the click of a button and it takes a couple of minutes.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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But the impact goes beyond time saved. Christopher points to a less visible but equally important shift: morale. Accountants are no longer dreading the monthly reporting cycle — the broken files, the stale data, the repetitive copy-paste. They are doing the work they were trained to do.

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“There’s a job satisfaction element to it. Before, every month you’d think, oh, here we go again. Five times out of ten, the files might break, or something changes in the source data and you have to do it all again. We’ve taken all of that away. An accountant is now being an accountant, not just copying and pasting in Excel all the time.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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From service team to strategic partner

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Perhaps the most unexpected outcome of Astrato’s success is what it has done for the BI team’s role within GlobalData.

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Christopher’s team started as a small analytics function. Today, Astrato gets mentioned in virtually every meeting across the business. Departments that had never engaged with BI are now asking for Christopher’s involvement, and the team has moved from responding to ad hoc requests to shaping how the organisation thinks about data, processes, and decision-making.

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“The amount of meetings where Astrato gets mentioned now is phenomenal. People naturally say, Astrato is the answer to this. It’s not, oh, we need this tool and that tool — it’s, get Chris on the call, maybe we can use Astrato to fix this process problem.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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This visibility has created a strategic opportunity. Because the BI team is now involved in conversations across departments, Christopher can address root-cause issues — data quality, process inefficiencies, system misconfigurations – that would otherwise never surface until they broke a report.

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“Astrato has opened the door for us to have proper conversations about how we do things when it relates to data. It’s not just a pretty tool that gives me some nice graphs. It’s opened the door to fix the root causes — data inconsistencies, processes that aren’t right. I’ve become the centre of the universe for the business, and I don’t think I’d get that with any other BI tool. Definitely not this quickly.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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Next: budgeting, forecasting, and centralised governance

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Seven months in, Astrato has become the default platform for new analytics initiatives at GlobalData. Chris’s next priorities include three projects that extend Astrato’s reach beyond reporting into operational decision-making.

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The first is a budgeting and forecasting module for the finance team – moving the planning process out of Excel and into a live, interactive environment. The second is centralising approximately 15 Excel-based mapping tables that drive much of GlobalData’s dimensional data. By managing these in Astrato with proper audit logs and sign-offs, the team can improve governance and eliminate the confusion of spreadsheets being passed between departments. The third is adapting the forecasting model to manage a new sales commission scheme.

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“Everybody in the business is starting to latch onto it and see that Astrato is possibly the answer to a lot of people’s problems. We don’t need more technology, we don’t need other tools. Astrato can potentially do everything that we need.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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For Chris, the real measure of success is not the tool itself but what it enables: a shift from producing reports to interpreting them – and from managing data to managing the business.

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“We want to start adding real value to what people do. Instead of creating Excel, they’re actually looking at the numbers and offering strategic direction to the business.” — Christopher Smith, Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager, GlobalData

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