Years ago I joined a new FP&A team with accountability over financial and operational reporting for a business unit.

I had 12 analysts and 5 reporting resources - I thought I was STACKED with resources and talent. But I pretty quickly learned that my team was falling behind. It seemed impossible until I learned we had 173 reports…

Building anything new took months.
Small cosmetic changes sat in a queue for weeks.
My entire team spend their days catching up with reporting requests.

My reporting team had built a prison for themselves. What seemed like a great idea - building everything in Tableau so it’s automated - turned out to be the reason we were being held back from adding value.

The worst part… after inventorying and studying usage, I found that executives were only relying on 8 of them.

Let’s talk about how this all happened and how you can avoid it…

It’s not that we had “too many reports” it’s that they were the wrong kind of useful.

Here’s the trap FP&A teams can fall into if we’re not careful:

You build a report for a business partner.
It serves a real purpose.
A few months later, someone else asks for something similar but slightly different.
You build another one.
Then another…
Months later, the data underneath shifts - a source table changes, a field gets deprecated, a business unit reorganizes - and suddenly your “automated” Tableau dashboard needs to be fixed.

Now your reporting team isn’t building new things. They’re fixing broken things. They’re fielding Teams messages from business partners saying “hey, my numbers look off.” They’re tinkering with direct SQL code behind the reports, learning who to reach out to in IT, and working unofficial channels to get data fixed because the official change process takes too long.

And here’s the part you only get once you’ve lived it: automated reporting is not free.

Every Tableau dashboard backed by direct SQL might update on it’s own daily, but it still has a maintenance cost. When you have 173 reports, you don’t have an automated reporting system — you have 173 individual maintenance liabilities.

Meanwhile, my executives weren’t asking for more dashboards (their teams were, but that’s a different issue). They were asking: “Why can’t finance tell us what’s actually going on?”

The answer was sitting in those 165 reports nobody needed. My team’s capacity was being destroyed by report maintenance instead of analysis and insights.

I didn’t just start killing reports. That backfires - every report has a stakeholder who fights for their [arguably] critical report. Instead, I used a systematic approach:

1. Build the complete report inventory (name, owner, frequency, audience, hours per cycle)

2. Score each report on Adoption (1-5) × Impact (1-5) to get a value score out of 25

3. Calculate the capacity cost — we found 82 reports scoring 1-4 were consuming 140 hours/month (nearly a full FTE)

4. Have the sunset conversation — not an announcement. Offer alternatives: sunset, consolidate, reduced frequency, data dump instead of dashboard, or self-service

5. Reinvest the freed capacity into storyline development, proactive analysis, and better forecasting

We cut from 173 to roughly 60 active reports. Eliminated or consolidated 113. Not a single executive noticed a missing report. What they noticed was that finance suddenly had better answers, faster.

And I felt better about my team, our response times, engagement, and quality of output. It wasn’t easy or quick but it was effective.

Build the report inventory. Just the list. Don’t score anything yet. I guarantee you’ll find at least 3-5 reports that make you think “why are we still doing this?”

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