Month-end reporting is assembled by hand, every month

The same ritual every month: chase the site returns, retype the costs, repair the spreadsheet a formula died in, reconcile two versions of the same number, and send the pack out days after the month it describes. By the time anyone reads it, the job has moved on, so the business is steering on where things were, not where they are.

It persists because it is nobody's actual job, it is the thing squeezed around everyone's actual job. The fix is not more effort in the last week of the month; it is the report built properly once, its sources agreed, its dates owned, and the assembly run as a routine by someone whose job it is, so the hours come back and the numbers arrive while they are still true.