The Rising Water
Picture this: You’re at county headquarters. The phones are ringing. Forty-five different departments are trying to make sense of their budgets, their projects, their grants. And every single one of them is looking at the same data—but seeing something completely different.
That was Will County’s reality.
They’d already invested in a long-term partner project that never quite finished. The promise of unified reporting remained just that—a promise. Meanwhile, the water was rising. Manual entry. Mismatched totals. Zero visibility across departments.
They were stuck.
You know that feeling when nothing makes sense and you’re feeling overwhelmed? …Yea this is way worse than that…
That’s the kind of urgency we walked into. This wasn’t a “nice to have” situation. This was survival.
The Problem Beneath the Surface
When we sat down with Emily from Finance and Jason from IT, the scope of the challenge became clear. It wasn’t just about dashboards or pretty charts. The problems ran deep:
The GL Reporting Nightmare
- Budgeting follows a shifted fiscal cycle rather than the calendar year
- Budget data scattered across multiple views
- No clear way to see consumed vs. remaining budget by department
The Project Module Maze
- Posted transactions showing duplicate sales amounts due to “on account” entries
- Invoice proposals that didn’t match posted transaction totals
- Funding sources (organization, customer, grant) creating confusion about where money was actually coming from
The Department Dilemma
- Sub-departments that didn’t map cleanly to parent departments
- User groups that controlled access but didn’t translate to reporting
- No way to send the right reports to the right people automatically
As Emily put it: “Some departments have a couple of sub-departments that they take care of. It’s not like one department per sub-department.”
The existing system just wasn’t built for this complexity.
Enter the Creators
This is where Bish and Bhavana stepped in.
Their approach wasn't to throw technology at the problem. It was to understand it first. Hours of calls. Screenshots flying back and forth. Questions like "What do you actually do with this information?" and "Walk me through how you'd use this report."
The Key Insight
The breakthrough came when we realized the core issue: Will County didn't need more reports. They needed the right reports, delivered to the right people, with the right context .
Bhavana proposed a two-pronged approach:
- Posted Transactions for cost tracking—the actual money spent
- Invoice Proposals for revenue tracking—the money coming in
No more trying to reconcile duplicates. No more confusion about what "sales amount" actually meant.
The Proposed Solution
We invoked the 5 Standards of the Report Factory:
1. ETL Plumbing
Solidifying the data pipeline from D365 F&O to Microsoft Fabric. Clean data in, clean data out.
2. Data Modeling
A single source of truth. One data model that all 45 departments could trust. We built custom views to handle the department-to-subdepartment mapping that didn’t exist in the base system.
3. Visual Hierarchy
Flyovers for executives who need the big picture. Drill-downs for analysts who need the details. Everyone sees what they need to see.
4. Maintenance
Systems that can be managed even if outsourced. Documentation. Standards. Repeatability. No platform lock-in.
5. Portability
Architecture that can be moved between platforms without losing functionality.
The Transformation
It’s so weird to have all this extra time on our hands now..
Here’s what changed:
Before:
- 45 departments, 45 different versions of “the truth”
- Manual reconciliation taking hours
- Reports that raised more questions than they answered
- No automated distribution
After:
- Single source of truth across all departments
- Automated report distribution via email subscriptions
- Clear separation between cost tracking and revenue tracking
- Department managers seeing exactly what they need—nothing more, nothing less
The moment of truth came when we finished faster than expected. Jason’s reaction?
“You guys finished it too fast.”
That’s not a complaint. That’s the sound of someone realizing that the bottleneck was never the technology. It was the approach.
The Bigger Picture
What Will County taught us goes beyond reporting. It’s about the future of how organizations operate.
As Joe shared during one of our sessions:
I don’t think there’s going to be a reporting department in the future. What’s going to happen is that people will write an operating system that runs the business. And reporting is just for the AI agents, it’s just for the operating system.
The materiality of stopping and thinking—of pausing to look at printouts and decide what to do—is a massive cost to any organization. Will County’s transformation is a step toward a future where the right information flows to the right decisions automatically.
Your Turn
Will County’s journey from stuck to unstuck took weeks, not months. The investment was measured in thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
Every organization has a story. What’s yours?
Are you:
- Drowning in department silos?
- Struggling with data that doesn’t match?
- Waiting on reports that never quite answer the question?
The water might be rising. But you don’t have to stay stuck.