P&L Diagnosis in 15 Minutes

The Problem#

A logistics CEO was preparing for a quarterly board meeting. The company had 12 months of financial data spread across multiple reports, spreadsheets, and accounting systems. Synthesizing this into a coherent narrative for the board typically took the CFO team 3-4 days.

The CEO wanted to walk in with not just the numbers, but a clear diagnosis: where margins were compressing, which lanes were underperforming, and what operational changes would have the highest impact.

The Approach#

Built a multi-model LLM pipeline that:

1. Ingested raw P&L data, operational reports, and market context
2. Structured the data into comparable periods with automated variance analysis
3. Diagnosed patterns — margin compression by lane, seasonal effects, cost driver shifts
4. Generated a board-ready narrative with supporting data tables

The system uses vision models for document extraction, structured models for data normalization, and Claude for synthesis and narrative generation.

The Result#

What took 3-4 days now takes 15 minutes. The CEO gets a structured brief before every board meeting that includes:

• Period-over-period variance analysis with root cause annotations
• Top 5 margin opportunities ranked by estimated impact
• Assumption flags — places where the data suggests the current strategy may need revisiting

The system runs on-demand and improves with each use as the context window accumulates company-specific patterns.

Key Metrics#

• Time to insight: 3-4 days reduced to 15 minutes
• Coverage: 12 months of multi-source financial data
• Ongoing: System reusable for every board cycle