Issue #5: June 2025 Newsletter

Nick Wright
Jun 5
2 min read

Updated: 7 days ago

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Pentify Insights newsletter. It has been a strong quarter.

We’ve continued supporting clients across industries including professional services, property, manufacturing and retail to unlock greater business value from their data. From building scalable analytics foundations to fully automating month-end reporting, the focus has stayed the same: less manual work, more meaningful insight.

This Quarter’s Highlight

One of the key moments this quarter was Tom’s conversation with Damon Riscalla from Betashares, diving into how small and mid-sized businesses can make data work for them. If you missed it, read the full article here:

Making Data Work for You: What Every SME Needs to Know About Analytics

Musings: Why the Month-End Close Still Takes Too Long

The month-end close continues to be a drag on time and morale. Reports arrive late, reconciliation takes too long, and finance teams are left scrambling to explain numbers that no one fully trusts.

The core issue? Too much effort goes into collecting data instead of analysing it. This is not just a process problem. It is a strategic one.

Here are three ways to fix it:

1. Integrate Systems Sooner

If your finance team is waiting on data from multiple systems, you are already on the back foot. Connecting your CRM, ERP, and financial platforms into one reporting environment gives real-time access to consistent, complete data.

2. Automate Reconciliation

Manual reconciliation is a red flag. It signals your systems are disconnected. Build automation into your data pipelines to remove the need for last-minute checks and speed up reporting.

3. Build Trust in the Numbers

Speed is valuable, but trust is critical. Teams move faster and with more confidence when they believe the data is correct. That trust comes from integration, automation, and ownership of the process.

If month-end still takes five to ten days, it is costing you more than time. It is costing momentum.

By the numbers

32 - The average number of SaaS applications that an Australian small-to-medium business leverages to operate. Did someone say tech debt?
74 – Percentage of businesses that still rely on spreadsheets for at least one part of their month-end close
2.4 – Average days per month saved by Pentify clients who we have helped automate month-end reporting processes

Data in the news

Here’s what’s been happening in data and analytics:

Australian small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly undertaking data migration projects to modernise operations, enhance efficiency, and remain competitive. This trend is part of a broader shift towards cloud adoption as costs become more attainable for SMBs, with projections indicating that 55% of workloads will be hosted on public clouds by the end of the year
ChatGPT Enterprise now supports analytics plugins, meaning teams can start asking natural language questions to explore their data. This is a sign that self-service analytics is becoming more accessible to everyone.