PENTALINK

Insights

New perspectives.

Ideas, experience and practical examples at the intersection of finance, data and technology.

From Scope Drift to an Integrated Customer Portal

Standard tools hit their limits: a clean system landscape of Notion, CRM and Google Workspace enabled a granular customer portal — without the effort traditionally associated with custom development.

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Turning Data into Queryable Knowledge: A Semantic Layer and AI Agents

A semantic layer on Snowflake with AI agents and row-level security cut analysis time for ad-hoc requests from 3–4 hours to under 10 minutes — go-live in up to 90 days.

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Six Weeks to a Bank-Grade Group View

A firefighting mandate between two budget cycles: German GAAP and IFRS views reconciled via fuzzy-matching and AI account matching — bank-grade in six weeks.

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A Single Truth for a Major Project: Cash and Accounting, Audit-Proof

Cash data in Excel, accounting in the parent group's ERP — two worlds, a triple-digit-million gap. How a management adjustment layer brought the cumulative deviation down to 0.23%.

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Two Worlds, One Ledger: How an Energy Infrastructure Company Reconciled Its Excel Forecasts with Accounting

A several-hundred-megabyte Excel forecast model steers a project worth hundreds of millions — and contradicts the accounting books. How we reconciled both worlds with a multi-layer data warehouse on Snowflake, without abandoning the proven Excel model — for around €400 a month.

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Transparency in the Federal Budget: An Interactive Dashboard

In the election campaign, many numbers are being thrown around – not always correctly. This interactive Tableau dashboard lets you explore German federal revenues and expenditures from 2015 onwards.

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Getting the Most out of External Support

Poor experiences in interim management often stem from unclear expectations. Defining clear objectives, roles, and success criteria is key to maximizing the value of external expertise.

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Legacy ERP — A Challenge for the Whole Company

Outdated ERP systems create hidden bottlenecks across the entire organization. When knowledge is siloed and system transitions are blocked, even a €100M company can grind to a halt.

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Successful Optimization of a Power BI Project

Stalled BI initiatives often hold more potential than expected. Consolidating redundant dashboards into a streamlined system gave a CFO full control of the data landscape.

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Rolling Forecast: Crystal Ball or Resource Hog?

Rolling forecasts are gaining traction as planning cycles accelerate and markets become harder to predict. Not just a trend — a structural shift in how finance teams manage uncertainty.

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Low-Code, No-Code, AI? The Real Translation Problem

No-code tools promise to bridge the gap between business and IT — but they only solve a symptom. The real problem: humans and machines still don't speak the same language.

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One ERP for All: Curse or Blessing?

The fully integrated ERP is the holy grail of German corporate IT. But does a single system truly serve all divisions of a complex corporate group? A critical assessment.

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Tableau Interactive: Tracking the US Election

An interactive Tableau dashboard for the 2020 US election: explore state-level results and simulate how different outcomes could have changed the final result.

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