How Rideau Digital reclaimed 3 reporting days per month — and stopped sending wrong numbers to clients
Rideau Digital is a 14-person digital marketing agency founded in 2016, managing paid search, SEO, and social campaigns for 47 clients across retail, home services, and professional services in Ontario and Quebec.
Every month, the last week became "reporting week" — and everyone dreaded it. Account managers each manually exported raw data from Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, and Google Analytics for their assigned clients. Those exports — 47 separate CSV files per platform — landed in a shared drive folder.
From there, each file was manually copy-pasted into a master Excel workbook that had grown to 52 tabs and 68,000 rows. The file was 47MB and crashed if two people had it open simultaneously. VLOOKUP formulas referenced sheet names that changed whenever someone added a new client.
The combined monthly reporting effort was 37 staff hours. In two of the previous four months, a client received a report with incorrect cost-per-lead figures — one caught by the client before Rideau did. The owner was personally reviewing every report until midnight on the last Thursday of each month.
ClearFlow audited the workbook in a 90-minute screen-share and identified three failure points: fragile VLOOKUP chains, no validation on the CSV import step, and client report templates embedded inside the master workbook rather than generated independently.
A Power Query pipeline that automatically consolidates all CSV exports from a designated drop folder into a single clean data model — regardless of how many clients are added or removed.
A VBA macro that loops through the client list and generates all 47 individually formatted PDF reports in a single click. Total generation time: 4 minutes.
"I'd accepted that reporting week just was what it was. Three days of misery every month. When ClearFlow showed me the Power Query pipeline running for the first time and all 47 PDFs generating in four minutes, I actually laughed. I didn't think that was possible."