Tis the season for giving thanks and counting blessings. At Altair, we’re grateful for so many things, not the least of which our customers and the stories they share about how Monarch has helped them save time, money and – maybe most importantly – their sanity! Below are just a few of our favorites.

Each month Whitnell has to generate 415 packaged reports that detail its clients’ purchases of security shares and investments. The individual lots need to be reconciled from Whitnell’s accounting system records to their multiple financial custodians. With more than 1,200 accounts at one custodian alone, and more than 46,000 records in the final table that’s built from 20 separate tab delimited text source files, it’s a tremendous amount of data to manage.

“It took me about two hours to import all the source files into Excel through the wizard and make sure all the columns were formatted identically,” said Tracy Hojka, Manager of Operations at Whitnell. “I had to make more than 30 different format changes to the separate source files 20 times. That’s what took me so long.” The process was not only arduous, but manual as well, which meant it had the potential for error.

With Monarch,“when I import files every column is formatted the same way and it takes me less than 10 minutes to generate a table.”

Derek Madison, Leader of Business Financial Support at MasterCard, oversees the validation of transactions and cash between two systems, whether they’re MasterCard owned or not. He was charged with identifying new ways to increase efficiency and improve MasterCard processes. At the outset, the 13-person team had to manually reconcile system interfaces using reports that resided on the company’s mainframe.

Their first order of business each day was to print 20-30 individual, multi-page reports. Using a ruler to keep their place within each report, they would then hand-key the relevant data, line by line, into Excel for validation. “We’re talking about a task that took 40-80 hours each week,” recalls Madison, “As a growing company with rapidly expanding product offerings, we had to find a better way to prepare this data for analysis.”

“The Altair Monarch solution paid for itself within the first six months, liberating our department from manual data entry and enabling us to recoup 40-80 hours a week,” says Madison. “As a result, we have been able to expand our skill set to become more involved across new products and services and excel in customer service.”

What’s your reason to be grateful for self-service data prep?