Team 4 · Finance & Reporting

Finance & Reporting Pack

"The Excel Marathon"

🏦About Aurora Nexus Global

Aurora Nexus Global is a mid-sized financial services group operating across Malaysia and the APAC region. The Finance division manages Group financial planning, performance reporting, and Board-level communication. The team produces the monthly management pack reviewed by the Board of Directors and Group EXCO every cycle, but the process behind it is consuming more time than the output is worth.

⚠️Business Pain Point

Every month, Aurora Nexus Global's finance team runs what they call the "Excel Marathon": five days of manual data collection, consolidation, and reconciliation before a single line of analysis can begin. By the time the numbers are clean, analysts have one day left to write the Board narrative and build the presentation.

The root cause is fragmentation. Each of ANG's eight business units submits monthly numbers in slightly different Excel formats, with different column labels, different assumption bases, and varying definitions of core metrics. Finance analysts reconcile these by hand, chasing queries over email and Teams, often receiving updated files hours before the deadline.

When a number changes, and it always does, the analyst must hunt through email threads to find verbal approval, update multiple files manually, and hope nothing cascades. The Board presentation has gone to print with incorrect figures twice in the past year. Both times, the error was caught in the meeting itself.

📊Monthly Reporting Adjustment Log: Q1 2025

Report ID	Business Unit	Metric	Initial Value	Final Value	Reason	Approved Via	Documented?
RPT-501	Consumer Banking	Revenue	RM 142.3M	RM 138.9M	Late fee waiver	Email	No
RPT-502	SME Banking	OPEX	RM 28.4M	RM 31.2M	Headcount accrual	Teams chat	No
RPT-503	Treasury	Net Interest Income	RM 67.1M	RM 69.8M	Rate restatement	Verbal	No
RPT-504	Islamic Banking	Financing Revenue	RM 44.6M	RM 44.6M	No change	N/A	Yes
RPT-505	Corporate Banking	COGS	RM 19.8M	RM 22.1M	FX impact	Email	Partial
RPT-506	Digital Banking	OPEX	RM 11.2M	RM 13.5M	Capitalisation reversal	Email	No
RPT-507	Consumer Banking	Credit Loss Provision	RM 8.9M	RM 11.4M	Portfolio reclass	Email	No
RPT-508	SME Banking	Revenue	RM 89.3M	RM 86.7M	Delayed drawdown	Teams chat	No
RPT-509	Treasury	OPEX	RM 5.6M	RM 5.6M	No change	N/A	Yes
RPT-510	Islamic Banking	OPEX	RM 17.4M	RM 19.0M	Zakat accrual	Email	Partial
RPT-511	Corporate Banking	Revenue	RM 55.2M	RM 51.8M	Contract restructure	Verbal	No
RPT-512	Digital Banking	Revenue	RM 6.1M	RM 6.1M	No change	N/A	Yes

📧Email Thread

From: Group CFO, Aurora Nexus Global
To: Group Finance Team
Subject: Board Pack. We Cannot Keep Doing This

I received three separate "final" versions of the Consumer Banking revenue slide yesterday. Each had a different number. The version that went to the Board printer was not the most recent one.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the process. We have no single source of truth, no version control, and no documented trail for why numbers change. When a Board member asks me why revenue moved between the draft and the final, I should have a precise answer in 30 seconds, not spend 20 minutes searching email threads. I need a solution. Not a workaround.

💬Chat Extract: Finance Close Channel

Mei Lin 19:42

SME just sent another revised file. This is version six of the same pack.

Rajan 19:45

The OPEX change on RPT-506 was approved in a Teams message last Tuesday. Nobody logged it.

Mei Lin 19:51

The Board pack goes to print in three hours. I'm still reconciling Treasury.

Rajan 19:54

We need a process, not a shared drive. This is not sustainable.

Amirah 20:01

CFO just asked for the Consumer Banking variance bridge again. Third time this week.

🎯Your Tasks

Identify which types of adjustments and process failures are most damaging to reporting confidence, and what the patterns in the data suggest about where the breakdown is systemic versus one-off.

Design an ideal reporting process for Aurora Nexus Global where every number change is traceable, every adjustment is documented, and the CFO can answer any Board question within minutes.

Recommend how ANG can reduce the time spent gathering and reconciling data, and what the freed capacity should be redirected toward.

📝Your Working File

Your working folder contains 2 files for your team:

📊 BLANK – Promptathon Team Pack: your main working file. Use this to document your prompts, Copilot outputs, and key insights throughout the challenge. You will present from this at the end.
⚖️ Peer Judging Sheet: used during the presentation segment. You will score the other teams while they present their work.

🔗 Open Your Working Folder

Opens in OneDrive. Use Incognito / InPrivate mode.

🕵️

Important: Open the working file in an Incognito (Chrome) or InPrivate (Edge) window. This ensures you are working from the correct shared folder and your work is saved properly.

⚡🔒⚡

Power Ups: Locked

Power Ups are your next step — take what you built today and think about how to bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.
Complete your challenge tasks first, then unlock them here.

⚡ Power Up: Adopt It

You have used Copilot to solve a scenario. Now bring it back to your real work at Alliance Bank.

1 Pick Your Use Case · 5 min

In Tasks 1 and 2, you found that the biggest threats to reporting confidence are recurring manual adjustments with no audit trail and data gathered from systems that do not share the same definitions. You then designed a traceable reporting process that makes assumptions visible and verifiable. Alliance Bank's Finance and Reporting teams carry the same risk every close cycle.

Use cases from finance and reporting teams at banks like yours. React to these: swap, add, or keep.

Summarise a month-end adjustment log and identify the recurring manual corrections that appear most often and carry the highest restatement risk
Draft a data lineage narrative for a key management report, mapping each input, transformation, and assumption from source system to final published number
Review a reporting pack and flag every figure that relies on a manual input, estimate, or override, with a recommendation for each flagged item
Generate a process guide for a recurring report that can be used to onboard a new team member without losing institutional knowledge
Write a 90-day capacity reallocation plan based on the hours freed up if three priority manual steps were automated or eliminated

As a team, pick your top 3, then paste this into Copilot:

"We work in finance and reporting at a bank. Here are 3 Copilot use cases we identified: [list them]. Score each on: time saved per week, how often we'd use it, and ease of implementation. Rank them and explain your top pick."

2 Build the Prompt · 5 min

Your winning use case needs a great prompt. Paste this into Copilot:

"For this use case: [describe your winning use case]. What data or input would we need? Write the best Copilot prompt to make this work. Then show a sample output."

Test it. Refine it. Make it yours.

3 Pitch It · 5 min

Draft your adoption pitch:

"Draft a short adoption pitch for our finance manager: what the use case is, what problem it solves, what data or content we'd give Copilot, and what the first step is to roll it out to the team."

This is not your team pack.

Team Pack Locked