Case Study · Financial Services
Spreadsheets Emailed to the Board: How Milestone Group Built a Live Financial Dashboard
Client: Milestone Group
The Enterprise Challenge
Milestone Group provides advanced software solutions to the funds management industry, serving asset managers, fund product manufacturers, distributors, and life and pension companies. As a professional services technology firm serving institutional financial clients, Milestone’s own operational credibility depends in part on the quality of its financial management, its Board of Directors needs accurate, current financial performance data to make decisions about the company’s growth and operations.
The existing financial reporting process was not giving the Board what it needed. Milestone had a robust Deltek accounting system capturing detailed financial data, project profitability, margin by engagement, resource utilization, and revenue tracking. But that data was not accessible to the Board in real time. Finance staff manually compiled reports from Deltek, formatted them as spreadsheets, and emailed them to Board members on a scheduled basis. By the time a Board member reviewed a report, the underlying data was already days or weeks old. Version confusion and access inconsistency were additional complications of the email distribution model.
The Strategic Trigger
Milestone needed a real-time executive dashboard that pulled live data from Deltek and presented it to Board members through a secure, always-current interface, eliminating the manual compilation process and giving leadership the financial visibility they needed to make timely strategic decisions.
The Engagement Approach
Strategic Trigger
Inaccurate Manual Reporting Threatened Board Decision Making Processes
Milestone Group relied on a cumbersome monthly process where finance teams manually extracted data from Deltek Vision to populate static Excel spreadsheets. These reports were then emailed to the Board of Directors, creating significant version control risks and data latency. The tipping point arrived when a critical strategic review was delayed because directors were analyzing conflicting data versions. Leadership recognized this manual intervention was untenable for a growing enterprise; near-misses on financial accuracy and the security risks of emailing sensitive data forced an immediate move toward a secure, automated solution.
The executive leadership formally acknowledged that the existing reporting workflow was not only inefficient but strategically dangerous. Milestone needed a single version of the truth, secured within their enterprise environment. They committed to transforming the reporting function from a backward-looking manual exercise into a forward-looking strategic asset. The goal was to leverage existing technology investments in SharePoint to host a modern, automated business intelligence dashboard that eliminated manual spreadsheet manipulation and ensured directors always accessed real-time, validated financial metrics, driving confident governance decisions.
Stakes
Data Errors risked Financial Exposure and Regulatory Non-Compliance
The consequences of continuing with manual Excel-based reporting were severe, primarily driven by the risk of financial misstatement. When material decisions are based on outdated or erroneous data, the organization faces potential margin erosion, misallocated resources, and missed revenue targets. For a complex enterprise like Milestone Group, relying on static spreadsheets meant audit trails were non-existent, creating substantial compliance risk during external financial audits. A single formula error in a spreadsheet could have cascading effects, leading to significant financial exposure and operational instability if not corrected immediately.
Beyond direct financial impact, the reputational and strategic risks were critical. The Board of Directors lost confidence in the management reporting packages, hindering their ability to provide effective oversight. In a competitive market, a lack of trust in internal data prevents agile decision-making, allowing competitors to capitalize on market shifts faster. If Milestone could not modernize its internal financial data delivery, it faced losing credibility with external stakeholders, including investors and regulatory bodies, jeopardizing its strategic position and long-term viability.
Constraints and Complexity
Integrating Live Deltek Data within Strict SharePoint Permissions
The core challenge was not just visualization, but the real-time, secure integration of Deltek Vision financial data into SharePoint. This required complex, direct data connectors that could bypass the latency of overnight batch processes while maintaining absolute data integrity. Furthermore, the sensitive nature of the data demanded a sophisticated security architecture. The solution had to respect granular data-level permissions from Deltek, ensuring that Board members saw specific high-level rollups while limiting granular access to the relevant finance teams, all controlled seamlessly within the SharePoint active directory environment without managing duplicate users.
Complexity was amplified by the existing data chaos. Years of manual spreadsheet adjustments meant that the underlying Deltek data required substantial validation and cleaning before it could be surfaced in a live dashboard. Milestone had entrenched legacy workflows where department heads maintained custom offline workbooks to manage their budgets, resisting the shift to a standardized ERP data model. The migration strategy required not only technical data mapping but a robust organizational change management plan to drive adoption of the new, standardized visual reporting paradigm.
Selection Rationale
Senior Microsoft Specialists with Proven Delivery Depth
Milestone Group initially considered larger, traditional consulting firms for the integration of SharePoint and Deltek. However, evaluations revealed that these firms relied heavily on commodity staffing models and offshore resources, which introduced unacceptable communication lags and a lack of accountability for complex integration points. They needed a partner that offered more than just development capacity; they required specialized expertise and strategic guidance to navigate the intricate security and data architecture challenges inherent in connecting their ERP to a real-time Board portal.
i3solutions was selected based on their deep technical expertise as a Microsoft Gold Partner since 1997 and their proven track record of over 600 successful implementations. Unlike the alternatives, i3solutions provided an all-senior, all US-based team, ensuring direct communication and accountability. Their specific experience in SharePoint customization and complex ERP data integration gave Milestone Group confidence that they could deliver a secure, high-performance solution that met the Board’s rigorous requirements for data accuracy and accessibility.
Phase 1
Reporting Requirements
Worked with Milestone Board and finance leadership to define the specific financial metrics, dimensions, and visual formats required for executive decision-making.
Phase 2
Dashboard Design
Designed a SharePoint-based executive dashboard with Deltek integration, defining the data elements, refresh schedule, and access control structure.
Phase 3
Deltek Integration
Built secure data connectors between SharePoint and Milestone’s Deltek accounting system, establishing automated data feeds for all defined financial metrics.
Phase 4
Executive Rollout
Deployed the dashboard with Board member access provisioning and trained finance administrators on dashboard maintenance and data management.
Technical Transformation
i3solutions delivered a SharePoint executive dashboard integrated with Milestone’s Deltek accounting system that gives Board members real-time visibility into company financial performance. Project profitability, margin trends, revenue tracking, and utilization metrics are current to the last Deltek update, not to the last time finance staff had time to compile a report. The manual spreadsheet compilation and email distribution process was eliminated. Board members access the same current data simultaneously from any device, with no version confusion and no dependency on finance staff availability.
Measurable Outcomes
| Metric |
Result |
| Data Currency |
Board members access financial metrics current to the last Deltek update rather than days-old manually compiled reports |
| Manual Process Eliminated |
Finance staff time previously spent on spreadsheet compilation and email distribution fully recovered |
| Version Eliminated |
Board members see identical, current data, no spreadsheet version conflicts or access inconsistency |
| Decision Quality |
Leadership makes financial decisions based on current data rather than last-cycle snapshots |
| Scale Ready |
Dashboard architecture accommodates additional Deltek data elements and new reporting requirements without rebuilds |
[PENDING-CLIENT-QUOTE: insert 1-3 sentence outcome-focused quote in the client’s own language from a role matching the reader’s role.]
[Name or Role], [Organization type]
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Deltek-integrated executive dashboard and when does a professional services firm need one?
A Deltek-integrated executive dashboard is a web-based reporting interface that pulls live data from a Deltek accounting system and presents it to executives in a structured, always-current format, without requiring finance staff to manually extract and format reports. Professional services firms typically need this when Deltek data is valuable but inaccessible to leadership except through manual reporting cycles that introduce delay and manual error.
How does i3solutions approach SharePoint and Deltek integration for executive reporting?
i3solutions begins by defining exactly which Deltek data elements leadership needs and at what granularity and refresh frequency. For Milestone, this meant mapping project-level profitability, engagement margins, and revenue metrics from Deltek’s data model. i3solutions then builds secure data connectors that extract this data on a defined schedule and write it to the SharePoint dashboard database without exposing the Deltek system itself to dashboard queries.
How does the real-time data refresh work in a Deltek dashboard?
i3solutions configures scheduled data extraction jobs that pull defined Deltek data elements at specified intervals, hourly, daily, or at defined business events. The extracted data is validated, transformed into the dashboard data model, and written to a SharePoint list or connected database. The dashboard display layer reads from this refreshed dataset, so executives always see data current to the last extraction cycle.
What ROI should professional services firms expect from executive dashboard implementation?
Professional services firms that replace manual executive reporting with automated dashboards typically recover significant finance staff time from report compilation, and gain measurable improvement in decision quality from faster access to current financial data. For a Board that previously received weekly or monthly snapshots, access to daily or real-time financial metrics represents a meaningful improvement in strategic decision-making capacity.
Why choose i3solutions for SharePoint and financial system integration?
i3solutions has built executive dashboards and financial reporting systems for clients including the nuclear energy consortium, DARPA, and Milestone Group. Our all-senior team brings 600+ Microsoft platform implementations and the integration experience to connect SharePoint with ERP and accounting systems including Deltek. Our 15-Business-Day Microsoft Assessment gives professional services firms a clear integration roadmap.
Who This Engagement Serves
This engagement is relevant if
- An organization emailing sensitive financial spreadsheets to board members, seeking a secure, centralized review process.
- A government contractor using Deltek needing to automate financial reporting and document management within SharePoint.
- A company requiring auditable, permission-based access to dynamic financial data for its executive leadership team.
Less relevant if
- A small business using basic accounting software without complex regulatory or Deltek integration requirements.
- A company that has already automated financial reporting using enterprise ERP and modern dashboarding tools.
Ready to establish a governed Microsoft environment?
i3solutions delivers enterprise digital transformation on-time, in-scope, in-production. Microsoft Gold Partner since 1997. 600+ implementations. All-senior, all US-based team.
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