AI for finance teams. Month-end in 30 minutes.
Excel AI for finance teams has to fit how a finance function actually works: trial balance from the GL, actuals vs budget, variance, forecast, board pack, repeat. DataHub Pro is built around exactly that flow — drop in your spreadsheets and get the variance analysis, the Holt-Winters forecast, the anomaly flags, and the editable DOCX/PPTX board pack in minutes. UK/EU hosted, audit-trailed, white-labelled.
Updated 7 May 2026
Where finance teams lose time today
Most finance functions run on a depressingly familiar workflow. The AI revolution has barely touched the parts that take the most time.
The month-end loop
- Pull trial balance from GL → Excel.
- Reconcile, journal, re-pull → still Excel.
- Variance analysis: actuals vs budget, last month, last year. Pivot tables, formulas, manual chart building.
- Investigate top variances. Hunt the line items that drove the change.
- Write commentary. Paragraphs explaining what happened in each variance.
- Build the board pack. Charts pasted into Word/PowerPoint. Format. Re-format.
- Distribute. Pray no-one notices a typo.
Steps 3, 4, 5 and 6 are the bulk of the work. They're also the most automatable. None of the existing tools — neither traditional FP&A platforms (Anaplan, Adaptive) nor general AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot) — solve all four together for a small finance function.
How DataHub Pro fits the finance workflow
Six features that map directly to FP&A work. Each shaves hours off recurring deliverables.
Period comparison + variance
Drop in actuals + budget (or actuals + prior period); get variance by line item, % and absolute. Top variances surfaced; sub-totals kept; subsidiary roll-up handled.
Anomaly detection on every numeric column
Rolling z-scores flag points that are statistically out of distribution. Useful for catching coding errors, missed accruals, or genuinely unusual months that need explanation.
Holt-Winters forecasting + what-if
Time-series forecasting with confidence bands. What-if calculator lets you flex one driver (revenue growth, COGS %, headcount) and see the impact across the forecast.
Auto Report — board-pack DOCX + PPTX
Branded title page, executive summary, KPI table, variance chart, anomaly flags, forecast, recommendations, appendix. Editable. White-label your firm's branding.
Ask Your Data — instant answers
"Why did Cost of Sales spike in October?" — multi-step pandas analysis returns the contributing line items with rows on click. Stakeholders can self-serve the obvious questions.
Scheduled close-pack delivery
Set the close pack to run on the same date every month. The platform pulls the latest file, generates the DOCX/PPTX, and emails to your distribution list. Audit-logged.
What changes for a finance function
Four concrete shifts:
1. Close-cycle compression
The reporting half of close (variance + commentary + pack) drops from 1-2 days to 30-90 minutes. Reconciliation work is unchanged; the analytics + presentation half is what compresses.
2. Faster forecast iteration
What-if scenarios go from a half-day's spreadsheet rebuild to a slider drag. CFO asks "what if we hire 3 fewer in Q3?"; you have the answer before the meeting ends.
3. Self-serve for stakeholders
Operations and revenue leaders can ask Ask Your Data their own questions on the close pack. Finance team is no longer the bottleneck for ad-hoc number requests.
4. Auditable AI
Every AI answer is reproducible from its input. Working papers update without a manual log. Internal audit and external audit both move faster.
Who on a finance team uses DataHub Pro
FP&A analysts
The biggest user group — variance analysis, forecasting, board-pack building. Most FP&A analysts who switch report saving the equivalent of one day per close.
Financial controllers and CFOs
Self-serve dashboards on the latest close. Ask Your Data on the trial balance for instant drill-down. Audit logs for governance.
Heads of finance at SMEs and growth-stage businesses
Often a one-person finance function. The platform expands their capacity to deliver advisory-level analytics without hiring an analyst.
What this isn't
DataHub Pro is not consolidation software (think Onestream, Tagetik). It doesn't run multi-entity, multi-currency consolidations across a complex group structure. It's an analytics + reporting layer that sits on top of whatever consolidation or GL produces your numbers. For most SMEs without a consolidation platform, DataHub Pro covers all the analytics needs; for groups that need consolidation, run consolidation in your specialist tool and use DataHub Pro for the reporting layer.
FAQs
How does this compare to Anaplan or Adaptive?
Anaplan and Adaptive are full FP&A platforms — modelling, planning, consolidation, forecasting. They're powerful, expensive, and require an implementation. DataHub Pro is the analytics + reporting layer for finance teams whose modelling lives in Excel and who don't need (or can't justify) a six-figure FP&A platform. We're often the right fit for businesses up to ~£50m revenue; above that, an enterprise FP&A tool starts to make sense.
Can I plug it into our existing GL?
Direct GL connectors are on the roadmap. Today, every GL exports CSV/Excel — Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP via DataExtractor — and DataHub Pro reads those exports natively. Most finance teams prefer the snapshot pattern (export, analyse, archive) over a live link for audit reasons.
Does it handle multi-currency?
Yes — multi-currency analysis with FX conversion is supported on Pro. Source data can be in mixed currencies; the platform converts to a reporting currency using configurable rates. Multi-entity consolidation is not in scope (see caveat above).
How is forecasting done?
Holt-Winters exponential smoothing for time-series. Trend + seasonal + residual decomposition. 80% and 95% confidence bands. Tunable seasonality (monthly, quarterly, custom). The what-if layer lets you flex assumptions without re-modelling. For more on the technical detail see Holt-Winters forecasting.
Can finance directors get a CFO dashboard?
Yes. AutoInsights produces 3 narrative insights per upload; KPI dashboard pulls headline numbers. Pin the dashboards a CFO needs (cash, revenue, margin, headcount) and refresh automatically from scheduled file uploads.
Is there a budget-tracking feature?
Yes — Budget Tracking 2.0 lets you upload budgets vs actuals, set thresholds, get drill-downs, and receive alerts when a category runs over budget. Trend charts show budget vs actual over time.
How is data residency handled?
UK/EU regions by default. Pro tier customers can request a specific region. AI requests run through UK/EU-hosted LLM endpoints where available. Signed DPA available.
Can we set up SSO and audit logging for SOC 2 / ISO?
SSO (Microsoft Azure AD, Google Workspace, Okta) is on Enterprise. Audit logging is on Pro and Enterprise. SOC 2 Type II is in progress; ISO 27001 attestation is roadmap.
Does it produce a board pack we can present from?
Yes — Auto Report produces an editable PPTX with separate slides for KPIs, variance, anomalies, forecast and recommendations. Open in PowerPoint and present normally. White-label with your firm's branding.
How long does onboarding take?
Most finance teams are running their first analysis end-to-end within an hour of signup. The Pro tier full-feature trial is 14 days; that's enough to evaluate against a real month-end.
What finance teams use DataHub Pro for
Six analytical workflows that used to take a half-day and now take minutes.
Budget vs actuals variance
Drop in budget and actuals. Get line-by-line variance analysis, over/under flags, and a narrative executive summary explaining the biggest movers — automatically.
Period comparison (MoM / YoY)
Compare any two periods — month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter, year-on-year. Dimension breakdown by cost centre, product or region included.
Anomaly & outlier detection
Automatically flags unusual spends, missing accruals, duplicate entries and statistical outliers across the dataset. Every flag ships with its source rows.
Rolling forecast & scenario model
Holt-Winters 12-month forecast with confidence bands. Run best/base/worst case scenarios from your existing actuals — no separate FP&A tool needed.
KPI dashboard & trend tracking
Configurable KPI cards with MoM trend arrows, target thresholds and sparklines. Pin to a shareable live dashboard for the leadership team.
Board-ready DOCX/PPTX reports
Auto-generates board pack with executive summary, key metrics, variance commentary and charts — editable Word and PowerPoint, ready to present.
Replacing Looker? DataHub Pro gives finance teams the same boardroom-ready dashboards without Looker's complexity or £15k/year price tag. See how we compare to Looker →
Run your next close pack in 30 minutes.
Drop in actuals + budget. Get a branded board pack with variance, forecast, anomalies and commentary in under an hour.
See also: · For accountants · For insight agencies · For small business · Holt-Winters forecasting · · Home